Civic and Community Engagement
The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024
In the first `100 days of 2024 we will explore 100 climate solutions that may “empower you to evaluate, engage, and act” to address on-going climate change as an individual on your terms.
Whenever there is an extreme weather event, the media seems to wring its collective hands. Is event caused by global warming? Is this one particular event evidence of a changing climate? In the moment, and depending on the media company that owns them, they may or may not be able to comment on their opinion on attribution, or the process of establishing the most likely causes for a detected change with some defined level of confidence. This is the realm of the climate scientists, not the weather-guessers (what my father called the local TV weather personality).
Climate denial politicians like to make the “it’s the weather, stupid” argument. The Hill quotes Laura Ingraham telling Fox News viewers “It’s, hot, hot, hot, all right. After all, we’re in the middle of a season called ‘summer.’” Stronger hurricanes are “a fact of life in the Sunshine State,” declared Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”
Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it
Charles Dudley Warner, often misattributed to Mark Twain
Climate denial can only met with data driven arguments. Collecting and analyzing the data, and drawing firm attribution conclusions from it takes time, skill, and effort. True climate change attribution is only feasible with data collected over large areas and long times.
Meanwhile we walk out into a milder winter in Minnesota than anyone can remember and know, without data, that we are experiencing profound changes in weather patterns. These accumulated observations and impressions have value for climate scientists and increasingly those who are assembling the narrative of climate change and its impact on human society.
The informal information we accumulate as we move through the day is valuable and can add fine detail to the data driven climate models developed by experts. The incorporation of routine and reliable observations gathered from disparate “informal” sources often aid in identifying climate solutions.
And equally important accumulate weather anecdotes and narratives can help personalize the science of climate change to make it more accessible for those not yet ready to accept the reality, even if they experience the same weather events we do.
Some community science platforms that Heid recommends include ISeeChange, an app and site that allows you to take your experiences of weather climate, relay how it is affecting you, and contribute to a community record that you can access for insight and communication. Check out a story here.
Your local state climatology office may want you to become a weather data source or you can become a part of the The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network which is an exciting grassroots effort of citizens measuring precipitation right in their own backyards.
And the Thriving Earth Exchange “supports community science by helping communities find resources, project managers, and experts to address their pressing concerns”. They are particularly interested in your input if you are a community scientist willing to “offer their technical skills, expertise and networks to support communities in advancing their priorities through a community science project”.
Volunteering to observe and report your observations may be an easy action for you to take to help create a science-based climate narrative and enhance the efforts of networked climate scientists.
Next Up: Climate Action 88: Role-Play Climate Solutions
Howard Creel
#rescuethatfrog
Email: rescuethatfrog@gmail.com