Climate & Society – Page 4 – COP 20: Lima, Peru

October 28, 2014October 28, 2014

Trick or Treat? The truth about Halloween candy

Lets face it, Halloween is all about the candy! Every October, Americans spend at least $2 Billion dollars on Halloween candy. However, what most people don’t realize is that the environmental impact of these sweet treats is actually a trick. Here is the low down on Halloween candy, and how you can avoid the tricks and enjoy more treats.

Palm oil, a type of edible vegetable oil grown specifically in tropical climates, is an extremely versatile cooking oil that, among many other household items, is also found in candies. Palm oil is inexpensive and can be found in “50 percent of items found in supermarkets” (Donlon, 2014). This global commodity is extremely popular and production rates are doubling. So what is the problem with palm oil? Palm oil is a driving force of deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and greenhouse gas emissions, which are all contributing factors to climate change. Large areas of tropical forests have been destroyed throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa in order to clear land for palm plantations. This process of deforestation has several impacts on the environment. The process of clearing the land involves slash and burn agriculture, which is the deliberate burning down of forests. This burning results in habitat loss and species disruption, which in some cases is leading to extinction. The clearing of the land also makes it easier for poachers to capture and sell wildlife. Orangoutangs are often targeted by poachers. Not only does this impact wildlife, but also it releases stored carbon into the atmosphere, thus altering the concentrations of greenhouse gasses. This is just one aspect that shows the unsustainable side of Halloween.

Read further on sustainable chocolate!

This Halloween be “HalloGREEN” and refrain from consuming candies containing palm oil!

See how to enjoy Halloween treats without destroying the planet here!

Find more information about Palm Oil and how to get involved!!

Happy HalloGREEN !!

Donlon, Diana. “Trick or Treat? The Frightening Climate Costs of Halloween Candy.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 24 Oct. 2014. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.

October 28, 2014

Climate Change in the American Political Climate…Finally!

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As was brought up countless times on our trip to D.C. last week, a main concern with U.S. climate policies is the possibility of a changing political leader every four or eight years. Furthermore, by including congressional elections to this equation, every two years the U.S. national political climate (no pun intended) changes. Thanks to the U.S. system of checks and balances, no matter whether it is the presidency or congressional majorities which change, both positions have the powerful ability to change policies through tools such as limiting funding and executive orders. There is hope that because Obama’s initiative for energy emissions reduction through the Clean Power Plan is implemented through the Clean Air Act, there will be few attempts to disassemble it as the Clean Air Act has met little opposition thus far.

This attention on national climate policy is no longer such a fringe topic, as is exemplified by the use of climate change as a debate topic for the upcoming Senate mid-term elections reported on by Coral Davenport and Ashley Parker in the NYTimes. Both Republicans and Democrats are focusing on climate, energy, and the environment in their ad campaigns and in some unpredictable ways. For example, both Republicans and Democrats in coal-producing states such as West Virginia are careful to support the industry and workers. However, in Colorado, Republican Senator Cory Gardner preaches clean energy in front of a wind turbine backdrop in one of his ads. The bottom line is no matter the stance, climate change will be a more central topic in this year’s midterm elections and even in the 2016 presidential elections. Already, senate debates in Arkansas, West Virginia, Louisiana, Kentucky, Colorado, and Iowa have included climate and environmental topics, compared to the 2012 presidential debates where climate change did not come up once.

The greater centrality of climate and energy policies in upcoming domestic elections makes me hopeful that something could be done regarding climate change in the future, and even better, possibly independent of a candidate’s party affiliation. Additionally, this rise in domestic political focus speaks to and provides hope for the idea that domestic action is the only way climate action will take place, even if determined on the international regime level. The need for nation-states’, and non-state actors for that matter, is vital for any possibility of international regime goals such as the 2°C warming limit, to be achieved.

Energy ads from every angle

October 28, 2014October 28, 2014

Mixing Art with Science

Just a bit ago, James Balog came to Dickinson to receive his Rose-Walters Prize for Global Environmental Activism. He came to check out all sectors of environmentalism at our college. I was able to spend lots of quality time with Balog– he ate breakfast at my home, the Center for Sustainable Living, came to my work at the Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring, and he stopped by our mosaic class.

During our interactions, I was struck by how eloquent Balog was when talking about nature. When asked about how he felt connected with nature, he talked about how the night connected him with the universe. The sky is deceiving, he said, when the light stops hitting the particles in the atmosphere, you see where we really are. You see that we are actually on a rock, speeding though outer space. You see that we have a small home in a vast universe and we have to protect it. We can’t allow our little space ship to be uninhabitable.

He said several times that there is no one thing that each person should do to combat climate change, we each have our own talents and should use those talents for the cause. Balog is using his artistic skills to raise awareness about increased glacial melting due to climate change. Sometimes, visual evidence can persuade people of the danger in ways charts and figures cannot.

You don’t need to be an economist or environmental expert to make a difference- if everyone used their own talents in slowing climate change, the force would be unstoppable.

October 27, 2014

Is Music the Key to Climate Change?

By Maeve Hogel

A week ago today, we had the opportunity to spend two days in Washington D.C., listening to and learning from many incredible people working in the climate change field. By the end of the second day, I was exhausted and my attention span had been shot. However, our last speaker, Keya Chatterjee from the WWF, said something that caught my attention and has kept me thinking since then. She said that information doesn’t change people. She explained that those people out there who still don’t believe in climate change have already seen the graphs and the statistics and presenting them with more information won’t make them a believer. So then what can we do to get people to care about climate change? According to Keya, the answer lies in music, movies and T.V.

Music, historically, has been a powerful medium to represent cultures and time periods. Recently it has been used to make much more obvious political statements. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis played their hit Same Love at the 2014 Grammys, showing their support for equal marriage to an audience 28.5 million viewers. Similarly, Puerto Rican band Calle 13 has spread the word about the struggles in Latin America through many of their songs, including their recent release of El Aguante. Meaning ‘Endurance’ in English, the song discusses all of the things humans have endured through, from Pompeii to Hitler to Hiroshima. However, despite a comment about severe weather events and a jab at Monsanto, environmental issues are left out of Calle 13’s new song. Which leads to me ask, is the issue of climate change not conducive to songs and movies or do people just not care enough to talk about it in those mediums yet?

My guess is the second. I still think information is important; I firmly believe that education is a key component of solutions to most problems. However, when it comes to climate change, there seems to be a whole lot of people who know the information, but just don’t really care. People do, however, care a lot about music, movies and T.V.

October 26, 2014

DC Trip – A Wide Array of Climate Change

Last week the members of Dickinson’s Climate Change Mosaic was lucky enough to engage in valuable discussions with a wide range of climate change related actors, including: Tom Lovejoy, Bill Breed, John Holdren, Jacob Scherr, Mike MacCraken, Mike MacCracken, Dallas Butraw and many other highly regarded individuals. Although these private, public and governmental actors had careers focused in differentiated climate-related fields, their talks involved a common expected theme. This theme was the how to approach future issues surrounding with climate change and it’s governance.

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In which, Lovejoy’s solution was to restore vegetation, allowing for carbon sequestration through natural processes. Lovejoy explained that if restoration is implemented at a large scale, global temperatures could decrease by 0.6 degrees. One of his recommended mechanism was for everyone to plant a tree, allowing for carbon sequestration. Whereas Daniel Reifsnyder’s solutions consisted of closing the divide between developed and developing countries in the Paris’s agreement by requiring global participation with the right commitments. Jacob Sherr highlighted the importance of addressing the climate change crisis with “new architecture”. The “new architecture” consisted of having a mixed-track approach towards climate change governance due the need to engage multiple players around the globe. MacCraken focused on the benefits from completely cutting out long-term greenhouse gases, such as methane and black carbon. These gases stay in the atmosphere longer than CO2 and IPCC currently does not deal with the effects from black carbon. Keya Chatterjee encouraged the switch to solar energy for it was cheaper than diesel (in some areas of the world). She also discussed the need to engage the public through music and other sources of media to create global involvement. Overall, each speaker had influential ideas and thoughts on the varying issues surrounding climate change. It was evident that in order to approach climate change, actors from various fields need to come together to tackle the differentiating issues.

October 25, 2014October 25, 2014

The Built Future

As I look at what my life will become when I graduate in May and move past the limestone, as they say here at Dickinson, I have been looking more at my love of architecture and cities and the intersection with climate change. These thoughts recently made it to the forefront of my mind as I came across some interesting new studies on the longevity of contemporary building styles. I will back up some first. I have been planning on attending architecture school for some time now. I am still unsure of when that will be, but I will make that move at some point. I came to this decision after some realization that soon major cities are going to need rebuilding and expansion. I will touch more on that shortly, but first I want to be a part of this next generation of builders. The ones that will help shape the physical layout of a rapidly transforming global society. Imagine the infrastructure change as society shifts away from the heavily petroleum based ways that infiltrate nearly every aspect of life. Buildings redesigned for efficiency, transportation networks reinvented, social spaces that allow for more community building. This newly designed world will have to be adapted to the new climate that humans have wrought.

The article that recently brought these thoughts to the forefront of my mind came from Fast Company’s design section. It discusses the risk that climate change poses to modern buildings. It reports on a journal article that highlights the potential danger of concrete degradation from acid rain. Imagine how much concrete you come into contact with everyday. It is everywhere, and according to this study if you live in a city like Boston 60% of it could be gone by 2050. Their projections are admittedly for a worst case scenario, but in a country that already spends over $4 billion dollars on concrete bridge repair it is a dangerous scenario. While this study is focused on the effects of carbonation and chlorination of concrete, which is a coastal effect, I does make me think of the limestone here at Dickinson. Being a locally available and excellent building material, the glorious sedimentary rock makes up much of Dickinson’s campus. However, anyone who has ever been in an Earth Science course or has been rock climbing in the area knows that limestone is not the most robust of materials. It is a decent enough building material, but it weathers (chemically and physically) incredibly easily. Just pour some vinegar on a block of limestone to see. Household vinegar has a pH of 2, while clean rain is generally between 5.0 and 5.5. The pH of rain in Carlisle, where Dickinson is located has been seen as low as 4.3. While this may not create the immediate visual weathering effect vinegar does, increased acidity will lead to much more rapid breakdown of the limestone. To tie this all together I would ask that you think about how we will be building in the future. The planet has changed and the new rules are going to make it much harder to design and build. I am excited for this opportunity though. We are headed into a future of rapid urbanization and the need for innovative systems of buildings that help facilitate strong community and clean living (clean in the no-carbon sense). As new communities are planned, much more diverse buildings will be built in order to adapt to local conditions brought on by global climate change. The behemoth concrete giants of the past are no longer applicable. Buildings will need to be dynamic and utilize materials that will hold up to acid rain, flooding, or mega-typhoons.

October 23, 2014October 23, 2014

Artistic Expressions of Climate Change

When photographer and climate scientist James Balog visited Dickinson College a few weeks ago, our community was introduced to a new way of looking at climate issues in a means expressed through art. Balog expresses his concerns of climate change in the best way he knows possible, through his photography. His work was so stunning and moving that the movie Chasing Ice was made to motivate society and create a sense of urgency in calling for action.

Furthermore, on Monday October 20th and Tuesday October 21st, the mosaic group spent time in Washington DC listening to many guest speakers with several different backgrounds. Our last speaker, Keya Chatterjee, of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) had a very optimistic and positive aspect on the direction that the climate change movement is headed. She mentioned the power of art and music in modern society and suggested that maybe if climate concerns were expressed though different forms of art that this might have a monumental affect on modern society.

The New York Times article, “Extreme Weather” Explores the Climate Fight As a Family Feud, by Andrew C. Revkin, talks about the play “Extreme Weather”. Play writer Karen Maldpede, uses “theater to explore the clashing passions around human-driven global warming and our fossil fuel fixation” (Revkin). Included in this article is a video of author Andrew Revkin singing his song “Liberated Carbon”, listening to this song for the first time made me chuckle; the idea of climate change expressed though song is such a foreign concept to me.

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October 22, 2014October 22, 2014

NextGen Climate in New Hampshire

This weekend while at Pumpkinfest in Keene, New Hampshire I stumbled upon a bright orange tent with a sign right in the middle of the table that read “I’m a New Hampshire climate change voter”. Naturally, I went over to the table to inquire about who they are and what they do. NextGen Climate, founded in 2013, is a “non-partisan organization focused on bringing climate change to the forefront of American Politics” and “holding eleced officials accountable”. It is comprised of the efforts of seven states; Florida, Colorado, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Maine, Michigan. (NextGen Climate)

The photo below shows members of NextGen Climate NH doing their part this weekend at Pumpkinfest.

Recently in our Global Environmental Challenges and Governance class we have talked about the different structures and forms that climate governance and climate action may take place; international/transnational/national, public/private, Top-Down/Bottom-Up/Mixed-Track, etc.. It was extremely interesting for me to see an example of real local bottom-up action taking place.

For more information on NextGen Climate, please visit their website and consider committing to become a climate voter, helping to achieve their goal of 50,000 committed voters for the 2014 elections. Watch this video of president Tom Steyer speak about the upcoming November elections.

October 20, 2014October 19, 2014

Andean Civilization and the US Food System

This semester I am taking South American Archaeology as one of my four classes. Right now, we are discussing pre-Incan Andean civilizations, some of which inhabited the area of Peru that we will be visiting on our upcoming trip. While developments in pre-Incan cultures might not be directly related to climate change, the topic of climate comes up often in the study of pre-Incan cultures, as it plays an important role in societies that are so connected to the Earth and the environment. There was, of course, no anthropogenic climate change during the pre-Incan period, but climate affects civilizations nonetheless. In fact, the collapse of the Tiwanaku was caused in part by a changing climate.
The Tiwanaku, a civilization present during the Middle Horizon period of Peruvian history, from about AD 500-1000, was already seeing fragmentation in their society near the late 11^th century, as evidenced by the defacing of ritualistic monoliths– representing a ritual “killing” of the monolith’s ritual and power. But, beginning in the late 11^th century and continuing for a few hundred years, a drought hit the altiplano region of the Andes, the location of the Tiwanaku capital. At the time, the Tiwanaku had a centralized food economy, and the drought put stress on this, exacerbating fragmentations in an already disjointed culture. Local production systems came under the control of local corporate groups exercising local autonomy over their region, taking power away from the elites of the society (Janusek). Tiwanaku civilization was really an alliance of many different ethnic groups, which probably made it easier for it to break apart.

Obviously, a development such as the one seen with the Tiwanaku can inform our current situation with global warming. For instance, the US, similar to the Tiwanaku, has a centralized food economy that could be damaged by the effects of current climate change. Because all areas of the country depend on a centralized production center, the whole country will feel the effects of climate change, as a decrease in crop yield in one part of the country will affect the quantity and quality of food shipped to the whole of the country. We are not only facing at long-term drought, as the Tiwanaku did, but also rising oceans, more extreme weather, and hotter global temperatures. While we might have a better infrastructure than the Tiwanaku did, if we don’t do anything, at some point we will not be able to deal with the fallout from current climate change. Further, even if the US can deal some of these effects, the same cannot be said for less developed countries. These changes will not only have damaging effects on human populations, but might even modify economic and government systems. Already, and as Michael Pollan hints at in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, we are seeing, in some areas of the US, movement towards supporting locally sourced food (Pollan). Could this represent regions of the US starting to exhibit more local autonomy, due to the stresses put on the world’s economic and political systems by climate change? Furthermore, private corporations and subnational governments are working together to form transnational governance networks, for the purpose of working to mitigate and adapt to climate change below the realm of international negotiations, as they realized some of the failures of the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol. I’m not saying our whole civilization is going to collapse due to climate change, but climate change will definitely affect more than just our daily everyday life. It will affect the whole of human civilization.

Works Cited:

Janusek, J.W. 2004 Household and City in Tiwanaku. In Andean Archaeology, edited by H. Silverman, pp. 183-208. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

October 16, 2014October 23, 2014

Climate Change’s Link to Decreasing Honey Bee Populations

Honey bee populations have decreased from “5 million in the 1940s to only 2.5 million in 2014 in the United States” ( USDA) . Human-induced CO2 emissions could have affected the honey bee populations. Honey bees are major pollinators for plants, hence they are vital for our agricultural system. An example of this dependence is Californian farmers bringing in colonies of bees to keep crops alive through pollination. Plants and bees have co-evolved together, so bees know when to pollinate flowering plants. The major issue is that scientists do not know the environmental and genetic triggers that cue plant and pollinators to have synchronicity. Meaning temperatures have increased due to global warming, warmer temperatures have caused plants to flower earlier in the season than bees have been ready for.

Another outcome from global warming’s increased temperatures is that it has changes in migration patterns, which results in native plant’s lacking pollination. Another issue is that bees have been laying their eggs earlier in the season because of increased temperatures from climate change. Bees lay their eggs when temperatures are warm enough outside and require a constant temperature of 93 degrees for their eggs to survive. However, since they are laying their eggs earlier in the season there is a greater chance for cold days. These cold snaps have resulted in all the eggs in a nest dying, causing the future populations of bees to be stunted. (Earth Observatory). For example, bee keepers have seen a 30-90% population decline in winter. These cold snaps have resulted in all the eggs in a nest dying, causing the future populations of bees to be stunted. The decline of bee populations can be observed in weighing the nests. The nests indicate the bee’s health and their health has declined seen from the decreased weight. Although the effect of climate change on honey bee populations is still relatively speculatively, these points have shown that changing climate could have negative consequences on bee populations. Fortunately the United States has set up an $8 million fund for the preservation of honey bees.