350.org (organization)

350.org is an international environmental organization founded by Bill McKibben (author of The End of Nature, Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, etc). McKibben is one of America's leading figures in environmental activism, having written extensively on the effects of climate change. The name 350.org comes from the fact that the organization is aiming to keep environmental carbon dioxide concentration at or below 350ppm, which is considered the safe upper limit. The organization works to have governments adopt policies that will help lower carbon emissions. Despite 350.org's efforts, however, in 2013 CO2 levels surpassed 400ppm for the first time. This hasn't discouraged the organization, however, as they continue to take on governments and the fossil fuel industry in order to fight climate change.

One of this organization's major accomplishments was campaigning to block the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, eventually succeeding when President Obama officially rejected the proposal in 2015. Another big initiative is the Fossil Fuel Divestment campaign, which urges cities, universities, religious institutions, etc., to stop investing in fossil fuel companies. So far they're making good progress, with fossil fuel divestment programs popping up all over the United States in different churches and universities.

Another event that 350.org organized is the International Day of Climate Action, which took place on October 24, 2009. Essentially, they put together over 5,200 synchronized environmental demonstrations around the world in order to influence delegates attending the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Other activities that 350.org put together include the 10/10/10 Day of climate action (as a follow up to the previous year's), various climate marches, protests, planting trees, etc. Basically all these activities serve to spread the group's message and try to persuade politicians as well as the general public to rethink their stances on climate change and carbon emissions.

Climate Career - Computer Information Systems

Right now, I’m going to Western Michigan University to pursue a degree in Computer Information Systems. My idea for a career is to work with businesses to help them integrate technology into their business systems in order to survive in today’s computer technology-driven environment. What does this have to do with climate change? Well, I can think of a couple of instances where this career path would intersect with climate change. For example, I could help an organization collect and organize climate data in order for analysts to easily access that information and use it to study global warming and make predictions about the future. Or, I could help somebody who’s built a climate app to either provide useful information to users, or to organize large amounts of user data (e.g. basic information, statistics about how they use the app, survey responses, etc). Or perhaps I could be working with a company that has nothing to do with climate change, but still be working with information regarding some aspect of global warming (statistics, info on climate change activists, data for political science, etc). The point is that almost everything has something to do with computers these days. Every day, chances are you’re interacting with and relying on countless computer systems. Your cell phone is a computer, your car probably has a computer in it, your laptop. Every business uses computers in a number of ways, from cash registers to conference calls. Basically, this career bound to overlap with climate change in numerous areas, such as interacting with social media information regarding climate science, working with climate organizations’ information systems, or working with a company in the auto industry using data in order to make a more climate-friendly vehicle. 

Fate of the World (thoughts on the game)

Fate of the World is a game where you take on the roll of president of the fictional Global Climate Organization. Your job varies by mission (of which there are 9), but most of the time you're required to reach a certain year (such as 2120) with total global warming under a certain degree. There's other objectives as well, such as keeping climate change-related casualties under a certain number, making the most money possible by a certain year, etc.

You play the game by playing cards in certain regions of the globe. Each card does something different, such as implementing emissions taxes, starting vegetarian revolutions, committing to renewable energy sources, establish research centers, etc. To play these cards, you have to first recruit agents for each region (North America, China, South Asia, Southern Africa, Europe, etc.). Both recruiting agents and playing cards costs money, which you have a limited amount of during each turn. You have to manage your resources and prioritize; at the same time, you have to choose which particular cards you should play in each region, in order to achieve your goals.

At the end of each turn, you skip ahead 5 years and get to see some statistics about increases in Co2 levels during that time, number of climate change-related deaths, whether each region's expected emissions rate is above or below average, etc. You are also shown news about recent developments in each nation, such as civil unrest, drilling breakthroughs, major milestones in global warming, etc. When you start the next turn, you have more funding and are able to recruit more agents and play more cards.

The actual interface of Fate of the World looks kind of like Google Earth, except there's a lot of different buttons and menus to look through. You can read news about what's developing in each particular region, see statistics about various things (annual emissions, agriculture GDP, # of climate refugees, etc). You can also see each region's "technology tree" and see what technologies that region has been developing, and what it will develop in the future (if you play certain cards). You also can see global statistics such as population change, temperature change, changes in the earth's geography (such as melting ice caps), etc.

I know the game sounds super simple, but there's actually a lot of strategy you have to think through if you want to complete any of the missions without failing any objectives. Every single card you play can have a huge impact on how things turn out down the line. You have to be very careful to analyze each country and determine what's the best action for you to take in each region. For example, setting up your headquarters in a particular region will make that region more accepting of the GCO. That's actually another thing you have to worry about - if you do too many things to a region that it doesn't like, it can withdraw from your control.

Decisions that you make have a drastic impact on what new decisions you'll have to make for the rest of the game. For example: if you commit North Africa to nuclear power at the beginning of the game, everything might seem like it's working well until later on there's a major uranium shortage and entire regions are losing power. There's side effects that are difficult to truly predict so you're constantly cleaning up after yourself and trying to understand what problems you can expect and how you should avoid them.

Whether you realize it or not, when you play this game, you learn a lot about climate change. The thing that makes this kind of educational game work so well is that the learning is hidden within the mechanics of the game. It's not just demonstrating a concept to the player, it's requiring you to learn as much as you can if you want to succeed. You get personally invested in the game, which encourages you to try to understand more about what effects certain climate initiatives can have on the world. Instead of leaving you wondering what we can possibly do, Fate of the World puts you in a position of supreme authority and lets you find out for yourself. This game doesn't try to make learning fun; it makes learning the core of the game.

Fate of the World is probably one of the deepest climate change video game out right now in 2016, with a high possibility for actually learning things from it. It's reasonably complicated, but once you spend some time with it and learn how it works, it's honestly pretty easy to understand. I'd definitely recommend this game for college students, and possibly even advanced high school students.

The Island (thoughts on the book)

The Island by Gary Paulsen is a pretty neat little book. It's decently short (200 pages) and pretty easy Walden, if you replace Henry David Thoreau with a curious 15 year old who's not really sure why he isolates himself in nature. At first I really didn't care for the book's writing style, as there's a lot of dialogue that will make you roll your eyes, and the characters seemed like caricatures, but I let it slide considering how the book is basically intended for middle schoolers.
to get into. I'd say this book is pretty similar to

The main problem I have with The Island is that although adults reading it will understand it's purpose, actual middle schoolers who read it will probably have a difficult time staying interested because of the uneventful narrative. Just speaking from personal experience, when I was in 7th grade, I'm sure I'd be wondering "what's the point of this book? He's just sitting on the island doing weird stuff." Of course now I understand what Wil was doing and can enjoy the book for what its trying to say, but The Island is just dreadfully uneventful. The "climax" of the story, when Wil gets in a fight with the town bully, feels kind of weird and unnecessary. Paulsen's only explanation for it is that "Ray's the town bully, and the town bully starts fights cause that's what town bullies do." A pretty unnatural conflict, in my opinion.

Besides the book's flaws, I did particularly enjoy reading it. I related to Wil quite bit because I did something kind of similar when I was about 14, except instead of an island I sat underneath some bleachers and read books. One thing The Island does pretty well is capture the confusing "I don't know why I'm doing this, but I feel like I should" feeling that so many people experience. Also, it makes it clear that there was nothing extraordinary about the island itself; instead, everything that Wil learned from the island came from inside himself.

In terms of climate change, The Island really doesn't have much to do with it in the usual sense. It's never alluded to that the weather is unnatural or that strange changes have been happening, no natural disaster strikes the town, etc. The main connection you could draw to climate change from this novel is that it portrays a young teenager's personal connection with his natural environment, from which you can start discussing how climate change might affect other people who have such experiences with camping in nature (e.g. the destruction of camping areas due to climate change, the ethics of changing something that is as naturally beautiful as nature itself, etc).

Odds Against Tomorrow (book response) (Updated!)

Unfortunately, my copy of this book still hasn't arrived, so I haven't had a chance yet to read any of it. I'll have to either update this blog once it comes in, or just make an entirely new one. For now, I'll post a short synopsis of the book from what I've read about it online.

Odds Against Tomorrow follows the story of a young postgraduate quantitative analyst named Mitchell Zukor. After a natural disaster levels the city of Seattle, firms are now concerned with disaster-induced losses, implying that huge natural disasters are to become the norm in the future. Zukor's job is essentially to forecast disasters and predict the fiscal damage companies will have to endure.

It seems like this book is presenting a parallel reality where huge natural disasters are commonplace events, causing severe damage to even first world countries like the United States and requiring people to plan their lives and businesses around them. The author might be arguing that this could very well be the future we're headed towards if we allow climate change to continue along its projected course. I'm curious where Odds Against Tomorrow will go with this idea, and if it can serve as an effective warning to readers.

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My book finally came in this Friday so I've had a chance to read through it.

Odds Against Tomorrow is not a particularly difficult read. Its writing style reminded me of a lot of young-adult novels that are commonly read by High Schoolers these days, such as The Kite Runner, the Divergent series, etc. After the wordy, dense, heavily philosophical work of classic American literature that was Walden, this book was a nice, almost relaxing change of pace (despite its intense narrative). It's one of those books that you don't have to think very hard about while reading it.

Nathaniel Rich is really good at describing things. The New York Times describes him as a "first-class noticer," which shows in his writing style. Although at times his writing seems a little bit obvious (I guess that's how I'll describe it), he does well setting up characters and establishing their personalities and their actions in order for them to best fill their role in the novel.

When it comes to climate change, Rich honestly doesn't seem that concerned with the issue. While environmental disasters are one of the main plot points of the book, Rich sort of glosses over how unnatural it is for such huge disasters to hit so hard and so frequently, and makes no mention of humanity's role in creating them. To me, it seems that Odds Against Tomorrow is an accidental climate change novel. Although it seems like Rich's purpose was not to create a compelling narrative that concerns the topic of climate change, you can still examine this book as a realistic portrayal of how modern American society might react to large scale, climate change-induced natural disasters.

The setting of Odds Against Tomorrow could could easily be mistaken for an alternate 2016 where the only difference is that climate change has been accelerated, and major natural disasters are already hitting the continental U.S. It's noted that there's a deadly heat wave happening in New York in the first part of this novel, hinting that temperatures are already rising far beyond normal levels. Although this book is fiction, it's easy to imagine this kind of thing happening today. Odds Against Tomorrow is just hypothesizing how America would look if we were already at 4 degrees.

Walden (book response)

In Spring 1845, famous American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau decided to build a cabin on Walden pond in Massachusetts and live there by himself for a few years as a sort of personal experiment. In Thoreau's eyes, people work too hard at unfulfilling things and rarely give themselves the opportunity to live deliberately. He sees the world as too fast-paced, full of people who chase luxuries but fail to live luxuriously. Thoreau's choice to live alone with nothing more than the bare necessities (food, clothing, shelter) is his counterargument to the rapid lifestyle of his fellow Americans; he hopes to prove that one can live a happy and fulfilled life by escaping the "ruts of tradition and conformity."

There's something about Walden that makes you oddly disgusted with your own way of life as you read through it. Thoreau is very effective in making you almost feel guilty for living with modern luxuries. Lamps, headphones, charging cables, cell phones, bronco ID's, keurig coffee makers, laptops - it all feels so unnecessary as Thoreau describes his delight in hearing the birds chirp their tunes outside his cabin. Walden makes you long for a simpler life than we were born into, and encourages you to shed unnecessary luxuries in pursuit of peaceful living.

One interesting and relevant observation that Thoreau makes in Walden is that human beings can't seem to keep up with their own technological progress. Rather than shaping technology around our lifestyles, we shape our lifestyles based off of technology. The example the Thoreau uses is the railroad system (being the biggest technological breakthrough of his time), but the principle holds true for many modern things: cell phones, cars, etc. From Thoreau's perspective, these luxuries end up making us worse off overall since we inevitably end up spending more time on these items than we do focusing on ourselves as individuals.

Although I haven't finished Walden yet, I can tell Thoreau likely be a huge climate change advocate if he were alive today. It seems that mankind's unnecessary lust for technological progress and economic achievement is essentially the cause of global warming, and now our species and our planet are unfortunately destined to suffer the consequences of our actions. Rather than worsening an individual's quality of life (as Thoreau argues in Walden), climate change is essentially the same idea except on a global scale. Are we really better off with our modern technology if the planet is suffering because of it? Would we really be better off to abandon this way of life in favor of a Walden-esque lifestyle?

The Denial Machine (documentary response)

The Denial Machine is a documentary that explores the controversy surrounding climate change; particularly, why the issue has turned into a bipartisan political struggle in the last decade or so. The documentary focuses on a couple of factors that turned climate change from a fearful scientific discovery to a heated debate between environmentalists and "climate deniers." The Denial Machine blames this transformation on the use of language, political funding by large corporations, and well-spoken public climate deniers who aren't qualified to be denying climate change, among other things.  

For example, at one point when linguistic expert Frank Lutz is interviewed, he explains that he advised President Bush to abandon the phrase "global warming" in favor of the more friendly-sounding term "climate change," as the former indicates a worldwide catastrophe and the latter implies a natural, nonthreatening cycle. Such usage implies that climate change isn't as big of a deal as Bush's opponent, famous environmentalist Al Gore, was making it out to be.

 This is an example of a "denial machine:" that is, the intentional denying of a certain fact in order to achieve a certain goal. Another example this documentary presents is what it calls the first "Denial Machine:" the tobacco industry. For years, big tobacco companies campaigned to deny that smoking causes poor health, challenging the scientific research that backs up the anti-smoking claims in hopes of preventing a loss in sales. Eventually, however, the problem became so huge that even the tobacco companies had to admit that smoking can cause bad health effects. The Denial Machine argues that the climate change debate follows this same model, except instead of tobacco companies, now it's oil companies and other high-carbon producing industries.


This documentary reminded me of something that George Marshall talked about in Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change: strong story-telling is much more persuasive than simply presenting the scientific facts and letting people decide for themselves. A captivating story is one that has a cause, effect, a perpetrator and a motive. Greedy scientists are trying to fake global warming in order to get more government money. Big Oil Companies are funding climate denial in order to keep making money (the story that The Denial Machine tells). The truth is unfortunately much more complicated than this, and telling the story like that an oversimplification for the sake of captivating an audience.

The Denial Machine is an alright documentary. It's captivating and draws an interesting parallel between climate change and the tobacco industry. However, it can be overly dramatic at times, painting big oil companies as lying villains who pull tricks and fund liars in order to keep making as much money as possible. The truth is often too complex to fully tell in 45 minutes (the running time of the documentary), so it's somewhat distorted into an easy to tell and exciting to follow story of good vs evil. This documentary tells a captivating story, but after reading Don't Even Think About It, I'm somewhat suspicious of anyone who presents a "good vs evil" argument on climate change, knowing our tendency to internalize the information that confirms are views and disregarding anything that contradicts what we want to believe.