We Need To Talk About Greta Thunberg

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg was named
Time Magazine's Person Of The Year, and
some older white men are triggered again. 

Greta Thornberg, the now-famous 16-year-old climate activist, was named, to virtually nobody's surprise, as Time Magazine's person of the year. 

Thornberg dominated headlines for much of 2019. with her activism, which really brought to the fore a youth movement that is holding much older world leaders' feet to the fire on the subject of climate change.

All this seems to have a special talent for triggering white, rich men.

A lot of people expected Thunberg to be named Time's 2019 person, including me. Also predictably, the Time magazine announcement on Wednesday triggered more, um, triggering among mostly older, white guys.

Donald Trump Jr. the president's son tweeted, "Time leaves out the Hong Kong Protesters fighting for their lives and freedoms to push a teen being used as a marketing gimmick."

 Well, yes, there's lots to be admired about with the Hong Kong protesters, since they're pushing for democracy and all. The Hong Kong protesters seem to be more into democracy than Don Jr's father, but I will save that discussion for another day.

Seems Junior, the author a bad book called "Triggered," was himself triggered. Also predictable.

As usual, Junior was nothing compared to his father, the supposed president of the United States.

Today, our petulent president tweeted Thursday, "Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old-fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta Chill!"

Of course, Thunberg immediately clapped back at Trump by changing her Twitter profile to read, "A  teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old-fashioned movie with a friend."

This is the second time Thunberg made President Trump look like the hapless Looney Tunes coyote being played by the road runner.

 During a September United Nations speech, Thunberg said, "People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales and eternal economic growth."

Our beloved President Trump responded on Twitter (of course!) mockingly:

"She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!"

 Thunberg immediately changed her Twitter bio to: "A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future."

Yes, I know this is supposed to be a weather and climate blog, but I'm struck how a climate activist like Thunberg can make so  many mostly middled aged and old white men so nervous.

Quartz earlier this year noticed this, too. 

Says Quartz:

"In Australia, Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt has called Thunberg "freakishy influential...with many mental disorders.  Sky News commentator Chris Kenny Described her as a "hysterical teenager." who needs to be cared for."

She's also been called a "mentally ill Swedish child," unstable and a "millenarian weirdo" who needs a spanking."  

Greta Thunberg took Trump's mocking words toward her
Thursday by changing her Twitter bio page in a way that
threw Trump's words right back at him. 

All this over some teenager from Sweden who is outspoken about climate change, albeit one who managed to create a global platform for herself.

Conservatives have long railed against climate change activists. Just ask Michael Mann, an atmospheric science professor at Penn State and an outspoken advocate against climate change.

He's used to political and person attacks though he certainly doesn't like it

I suspect Thunberg is a threat to male conservatives because 1. She's a girl. 2. She won't shut up like "good girls" are supposed to do.

Instead, she claps back, as we saw with her Twitter war with Trump today.

Thunberg is also a sympathetic person, a youngster who has made herself into a poster child for how climate change will affect future generations.  It's a "think of the children!" argument, one that skeptics of climate change really don't like.

Conversely, Thunberg is lionized by climate change activists, because of her poster child status.  The following isn't meant as a diss: Every movement, every argument really needs a succinct advertising symbol to get their point across.

I also don't mean to belittle Thunberg at all for being a poster child or symbol.  She created this, and it takes a lot of brain power and talent to pull this off. She also doesn't let the incessant criticism get to her, which is extremely hard, let along a teenager to do.

She has inspired millions of youth to take up activism with the climate change cause. It's usually the youth, and often women, who lead the charge when change is needed. Thunberg understands this, and  has used this understanding to great effect.

As a side note, Thunberg has Asperger's, which maybe doesn't help her interact well with some people. However, she says helps her focus on the task at hand and helps her deflect criticism. Which is probably part of the reason she has accomplished so much at such a young age in the climate change battles.

Some on social media have taken to quoting Shakespeare regarding Thunberg: "Although she be but little, she is fierce."

Fierce is a great word to describe Thunberg. She'll tell it to your face, that's for sure.  At her UN speech back in September, she thundered to world leaders,  "We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth."

It's hard to say whether climate change is as existential a threat as Thunberg makes it out to be, but there's no question it's a biggie.  Over the next decades and centuries, it will cause countless deaths, cost us all fortune upon fortune, promote suffering and wreck the enviroment throughout much of the world if something isn't done.

Given that climate change is such a worldwide threat, and given that politicians and world leaders have largely given the crisis a pass so far, Thunberg has succeeded perhaps more than anyone else on Earth in getting us talking about the issue.

After all, you can't laugh at today's lame attempts by Trump to insult Thunberg without at least mentioning climate change. '

Maybe for that reason alone, Time made a wise choice by declaring Thunberg the 2019 Person of the Year.

The Best Of The March For Science On Earth Day

One of the signs at one of the Marches for Science on Saturday

I get it. The marches for science around the world on Saturday, Earth Day, were not all about climate.

This is a weather and climate blog, so I'm co-opting things a little bit from the scientists.

However, we can't escape the fact that much of the energy from the Marches for Science was a rebellion against science denial, and specifcially, denial of climate change.

Turnout, as expected was great. There were marches in all 50 states and in more than 600 cities around the world.

I'll (mostly) let people smarter than me decide whether these marches will advance activism on climate change, or change people's minds about the issue.

I've heard concerns that marches like  Saturday's are making science political. After all, it seems lately that liberals are tending to go for the fact based stuff and the extreme right (not the moderate GOP) seem to think that any fact that doesn't fit their world view is "fake news."

The climate deniers are the worst offenders with this. I heard somebody quoted this way and it make sense: Science has indeed become political but it's bipartisan. In other words, only the extreme wackos call scientific facts "fake news"

The debate now in climate change and other issues concerning science is do we find conservative or liberal or centrist solutions? These are obvioiusly debates worth having.

I guess I'll just devote the rest of this column to a somewhat more shallow look at the the marches: That means, the most entertaining moments, the weirdest, the most meaningful snapshots.

This was a very common sign at the Marches for Science.

After all, if you're going to engage people in any issue, you want to draw them in. Make them enthusiastic about what's going on.

People think science and scientists are  boring.  They're not. The Marches for Science Saturday I think was the coming out party for knowledge.

Of course, if it's a science march, things change a little bit from traditional demonstrations.

The usual chant at protests is: "What do we want?" "X" "When do we want it? "Now"

This time, the chant was "What do we want?   "Evidence-based science!" 
"When do we want it?!?"   "After peer review!"

As always, people got creative with signs during the marches.

One of my favorite signs was "Science is a cure for bullshit."

One of the saddest signs I saw was "I can't believe I'm marching for facts." Yeah, that is depressing isn't it?

The second-saddest sign I saw was, "Society should worry when geeks have to demonstrate."

Still, people want to stay optimistic. So one sign read, "Think like a proton: Stay positive"

Specifically to climate change: one popular sign captured the urgency of climate change: "Rise up before the oceans do."

Many people carried signs the read "Make Earth Cool Again," in reference to our already climatic-driven overheated plantet.

Another sign referenced President Donald Trump's climate denial and his shyness about revealing his finances: "Climate change is real. Donald'$ Net Worth is Not."  (The dollar sign is not a typo.)

And this gem: "Sticking your head in the sand is not a solution to global warming.  Your ass will still get very hot."

Animals were well represented in the marches. Which is effective. Everybody loves animals. Most people want to protect them. So this is great marketing.

A sled dog at one march carried a sign that read, "Climate change is melting my home."

As with all protest marches, it remains to be seen whether the Marches for Science have any real effect. But at least it puts politicians on notice that people who believe in a fact-based world are a very large constituency.

And they vote.

Next Up: Climate March On Washington

There's a huge climate march planned on April 29 to
protest the Trump administration's expected inaction
on climate change. I'm sure there will be other marches
in other cities, including one near you. 

Big demonstrations against President Donald Trump's policies are all the rage already, just two weeks into his term.

The big Women's March, huge in Washington and all around the United States, hit just one day after Trump was inaugurated.

Over the weekend, big demonstrations blossomed nationwide as Trump invoked an executive order banning many immigrants and travelers from certain Muslim countries.

I'm sure there will be many more marches and protests, and one potential biggie that is formulating is a march on climate change.

That demonstration still seems to be in its developmental stages, so I'm not sure on the particulars yet.  I'm guessing, though, that it's going to be pretty big, and take place in many cities across the United States and the world, not just in Washington DC.

I've seen planned dates for this demonstration to be on April 29.  It would make sense to have the big protest then, since it's close to Earth Day.

350.org, the big climate activist group, has scheduled April 29 as the big march dates, so that's why I'm 99 percent sure it will be then.

Here's what the 350.org web site has to say about this:

"That's  the date of the People's Climate Mobilization, a major march in Washington DC when we will come together with hundreds of thousands of people to reject Trump's attack on our communities and climate, amd push forward with our vision of a clean energy economy that works for all."

As I said, I'm sure there will be marches in other cities on that date for people who can't make it to Washington.

Meanwhile, there's also going to be a March For Science on Earth Day, April 22. This one isn't limited to climate change issues but certainly involves the subject. It's meant to demonstrate facts, science and peer review are much more important and reliable than made up facts meant to fulfill a political narrative.

It'll be interesting to see how many people turn out for these climate and science marches on April 22 and 29. There's no doubt climate change is a real biggie on the importance scale.

Yet there's so many competing issues people are outraged about in the here and now. Refugees, freedoms, the economy, you name it.

Of course climate change is happening this very second and the longer we dawdle the worse the problems will be in the future. However, human nature, being what it is, tends not to look at the hazard that is perceived to be down the road. They look at what the see right in front of their noses.

That's not to discourage the climate march. I hope LOTS of people attend and make their voices heard. Let's break some crowd records with this one.

My Favorite New Word "Factivsm" Saving Science Under Trump

In recent days, signs point to scientists really ramping up
"factivism" to counter the Trump administration's climate denial.

You might have heard of the daring social media manager for the Badlands National Park, who in a welcome fit of resistance on Tuesday, tweeted out a series of facts about climate change.

The people at Badlands did this to protest the Trump administration's apparent silencing of science - and facts- to suit what is more comfortable for him anyway, Trump's "alternative fact" universe.

Trump is no fan of climate science, having famously called that very climate science a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese and others to thwart United States economic development.

Or something.

Since taking office less than a week ago, Trump's administration has ordered employees at the Environmental Protection Agency to not discuss a new freeze on grant funding and told personnel at the U.S. Department of Agriculture from releasing research documents.

And, famously, the Trumpsters at least temporarily told the National Park Service from tweeting photos of the crowd size at Trump's inauguration because it depicted crowds smaller than in the president's fantasy world.

All these agencies deal with climate change a bit, and these gag orders were all too much for somebody at the Badlands National Park in South Dakota.

So they tweeted the following on Monday:

"Flipside  of the atmosphere: Ocean acidity has increased 30% since the Industrial Revolution. "Ocean Acidification #climate #carboncycle." 

And tbis: "Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years #climate."

AND this: "The pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). As of of December, 2016, 404.93 ppm."

These three statements are just Climate 101, something any serious student of climate change knows.

But these facts, tweeted in apparent defiance of Trump, are a form of resistance that has been dubbed "factivism"   It's the act of combating Trump and his minions and their alternative reality with facts.

I really like this. Especially when it comes to climate change, when there's so much science going on in that field and so much temptation to silence the science among the climate deniers in the White House and elsewhere.

As New York Magazine points out, the Badlands tweets from Tuesday are only a minor form of insult to the Trump administration. But Trump can't bear even minor insults and if there's multiple cases of factivism going on, that could be a real weapon against Trump's fight against the climate change fight.

The Badlands Twitter account was silenced after this, and whoever tweeted those climate facts will probably be fired. (Though I'm not too worried about him or her, I bet there's a lot of science organizations that need a good social media communicator like that person.)

The famoust Badlands tweets have been deleted, but so many people saved screenshots of them that they are still being widely distributed 24 hours later.

All kinds of other factivsm resistance organizations, media and efforts have cropped up even before Trump was inaugurated, and that has accelerated in the past week.

In an apparent response to Tuesday's Badlands tweets, another Twitter account, @AltNatParkSer bills itself as the "unofficial "resistance" team of U.S. National Park Service.

By midafternoon eastern time Wednesday, @AltNatParkSer had accumulated 535,000 followers, including me. Two hours later, it was up to 608,000 followers.

Some of @AltNatParkSer Tweets poke mean fun at President Trump to try to get under his skin, like this one: "Reports of an unidentified orange haired mammal close to President's Park. Possibly invasive species. DC animal services have been notified."

Some bring up science: "The @USGS has a full list of US agencies running climate change programmes. Could they all be wrong, Mr. President?"

Other tweets note the admittably scary thing the people behind the account are doing: "This account should not have to exist & we are sorry for any problems we are causing our colleagues. But we didn't start this."

But they will continue, and the effort seems to be spreading.

There's a movement to organize a Scientists March On Washington, modeled after the highly successful Women's Marches last weekend.

I doubt 500,000 scientists will descend on Washington, but you never know.

There's also a move to get more scientists to run for public office, and encourage people to support those politician/scientists.

The organization is called 314 Action, and it's kinda modeled after Emily's List, the group that encourages women to run for office and others to support them.

Climate scientists, and any other scientist for that matter, are also being directed to an internet archive site where they can save climate change web pages and data before the Trump administration scrubs it away from U.S. government sites.

There's a lot of talk about resistance to Donald Trump. Trump, meanwhile, appears not to want the public to know the true facts about climate change, or practically anything else for that matter.

Scienced are taking on the unlikely role of resisting the Trump administration's climate denial. These scientists might turn out to be our most important factivists.

Scientists Fear Climate Data Blackout Under Trump

A famous tweet by Donald Trump shows
 his "knowledge" of climate science. 

Climate science, despite the hysterical objections of climate denialists. is based on data.

The more data we get, the more we understand how climate change will affect us,  how bad it will get, what we need to do to mitigate it, and how we go about trying to erase the worst effects of it.  

Just in the past week, we've gotten big dumps on informatio from the Arctic, and how it's had a rough climate year, and what that means for us.

For instance, the data shows, according to an "Arctic Report Card" from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the following, as reported by The Verge:

"The so-called Arctic Report Card showed a few new records this year: the minimum extent of Arctic sea ice from mid-October to late November was the lowest since satellite observations began in 1979.

In the North American Arctic, spring snow cover in May fell to the lowest levels since satellite observations begin in 1967. And the average air temperature over land this year was also the highest on record, representing a 6.3 degree Fahrenheit increase since 1900."

Then there's Greenland. We learned this week that two new studies published in Nature indicate the Greenland ice sheet is less stable than may scientists thought. Everybody knew there was a melting trend in Greenland, contributing to global sea level rise, but the new studies said what was thought to be a fairly stable ice sheet could melt down almost completely, at least eventually.

That would create a lot more sea level rise than many scientist originally thought.

All this is to say we need a lot more data and a lot more science to fully understand the complexity and implications of climate change.

But we're entering a period under the Trump administration that is hostile to climate science.

Trump has been notoriously dismissive and ignorant about climate change. As an example, a couple of winters ago, he tweeted that since there was a nasty January cold wave going on in New York City, that must mean climate change is a hoax.

He's stocking his cabinet and staff with climate change deniers and people from the oil industry, who have a vested interested in denying climate change.

Worse, Trump is not officially in office and he appears to be already on a witch hunt to scrub the federal government of climate scientists.

The Trump transition team had asked for a list of people in the Department of Energy who are working on climate science.

The Energy Department declined to give those names, and the Trump transition team is disavowing the request for the list as a mistake by a Trump employee who was not authorized to make that request.

Still, you can understand why people are nervous.  

Advocates say climate scientists should get more
ito the forefront of climate activism and social media.

That's why there's a big social media push to collect data pertaining to climate change and storing it on the cloud or scattering it across the world to make it harder for someone who might want to maliciously destroy the data, to keep it from seeing the light of day.

A lack of data, the logic goes, would stymie the work of climate scientists and activists in the age of Trump.

Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist, journalist and climate activist is a ringleader in this effort.

Holthaus told NPR:

"There are ways of keeping this data open and publicly available and uninterrupted during any sort of era of our government that might be hostile to climate science. 

And it definitely feels like we are entering a time when climate scientists feel the need to sort of hunker down and preserve wat they've done so far. This project is helping them to continue their work uninterrupted

And again, the goal in this project is not out of some paranoia of a conspiracy to erase knowledge from humanity. It's to make sure that we are advocating for climate science in the sense that these scientists ave devoted their lives, and they are now going to be operating under a government that is hostile to climate science."

Holthaus went on with NPR:

 "I wouldn't expect the Trump team to come and say, you know, by the way, we're going to just delete all the work that you guys have done for the last decades. I think the most likely scenario is that there will be across-the-board budget cuts in the realm of climate science across multiple parts of the government."

Collecting science data is all wonderful if you have scientific data with you or your scientific organization has collected it. But is there anything we can do to help?  I reached out to Holthaus and others via Twitter. His and other suggestions are to donate to university science departments and other scientists and become a citizen scientist yourself. 

To be a citizen scientist, you don't have to learn how to take ice cores on an Arctic glacier, then live there on a pile of ice for a year.

There are programs to hook up with in which you can observe changes in your local environment. These small scale projects are a great ingredient, believe it or not, to understand climate change.

Meanwhile, there is a movement to convince climate scientists to do more outreach, more activism to get the word out and combat anything Trump might do.

Some scientists already do this, perhaps most notably Michael Mann, the Penn State Atmospheric Science professor and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State who has actually gotten death threats because of his science and was sued by climate denialists who questioned the integrity of his work. (Several independent reviews concluded Mann's science was sound.)

The lawsuit experience has turned him into an activist, and he's all over social media and the media in general to spread his science, and yes, his opinions.

Other climate scientists should follow suit, at least to an extent, says people like current Obama administration U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell reently told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union that to fight Trump's Tweets, scientists have to counter-Tweet, and more.

According to The Verge:

"She name checked Snapchat and Twitter, and pointed out that one of the most popular tweets from the U.S. Geological Survey reached a lot of people because Leonardo DiCaprio retweeted. it. DiCaprio hs re than 16 million followers. 'You guys are all rock stars to me,' Jewell told the crowd. 'But I don't think any of you have 16 million followers."

There might even be an assist or two from politicians.

According to the Sacramento Bee, at the same American Geophysical Union meeting where Jewell spoke, California Gov. Jerry Brown said if Trump turns off climate monitoring satellites, "California will launch its own damn satellite....Were going to collect that data." 

"We've got the scientists, we've got the lawyers and we're readh to fight. We're read to defend," Brown said.

It will be an interesting, rough four to eight years in the climate science wars. The good news is forces are mobilizing to attempt to keep the Trumpsters in check.

The bad news is I doubt we can totally keep scientific integrity going in the next few years.

Meanwhile, I'm sure the climate-related disaster and humanitarian crises will keep piling up.

It's a wonderful world.
 

Weird Climate Deniers Now Literally Stalking Climate Activists

Climate activist and 350.org founder Bill McKibben
says he's being harassed by people from a climate denying
organization. It's all weird. 

Fellow Vermonter Bill McKibben is well known internationally as an activist on climate change.

Many people support his activism and a few do not and that's all good.

What isn't good is the weird lengths a few in the climate change denial crowd do to try to shut him up.

They're literally stalking McKibben and other climate activists, and that should be a concern to everyone. That includes people who think the world's climate is not warming up.

This has made life bizarre for McKibben and other climate activists. On August 5 in a New York Times op-ed, he wrote:

".......my days in public have often involved cameramen walking backward and videotaping my every move. It's mostly when I travel. (I've encountered them in at least five states so far, as well as Australia), and generally when I'm in a public or semipublic place.

They aren't interested in my arguments; instead, these videos, usually wordless, are simply posted on Twitter, almost always with music. One showed me sitting in a church pew, accompanied by the song 'Show Me That Smile,: The tweet read, 'Ready for his close-up."

According to Politico, this paparazzi nonsense is the work of America Rising Squared, an arm of the the Republican research group America Rising.

Says Politico:

".....the push will include trackers with video cameras to follow the activists, a significant effort to research them and their work, a six-figure digital ad campaign focused on social media, and a website - corenews.org - that will serve as a hub for the group's content."

It would be one thing if America Rising Squared were actually analyzing the words and deeds of McKibben and other activists.

After all, McKibben thrust himself in the public spotlight with his work, so it's perfectly acceptable to judge his words: Is he accurate? Does his work make sense? Are there any holes in his logic? Does he have his facts straight? All fair game.

But this is different. This seems to be an effort to silence McKibben and others, by making his life weird and uncomfortable and scary, and unleashing the zillions of wackos on the Internet to troll and harass and even endanger him.

Which is a sign that America Rising Squared and its supporters are bankrupt in terms of facts.

If McKibbon and his buddies were that wrong, it would be easy to shut him down with facts that contradict his arguments. Instead, they're just trying to shut McKibbon up through any means necessary.

I guess America Rising Squared thinks its little videos of climate activists supposed hypocrisies will win the political battle over climate change.

After all, McKibben has been seen carrying (EEK!) plastic bags and driving a car, which burns fossil fuel, contributing to climate change.

So McKibben is supposed to be so ideologically pure that he can't burn any fossil fuel at all? He's not supposed to live in the real world?

Or as McKibben wrote in the New York Times:

"My house is covered in solar panels, and I plug my car into a socket those panels power. But environmentalists also live in the world we're trying to change: We take airplanes and rent buses for rallies; we make a living, shop for groceries. None of this should demand an apology. 

Changing the system, not perfecting our own lives, is the point. 'Hypocrisy is the price of admission in this battle." 

America Rising Squared argues that McKibben is a public figure and can be monitored, photographed and filmed. I bet even McKibben would agree with that.

But when does quote, unquote holding him accountable become harassment to shut him up?

Of course, as McKibben concluded in his New York Times op-ed:

"A good thing about movements is that you really do have brothers and sisters, and they do have your back. The fossil fuel industry may threaten us as a planet, as a nation, and as individuals, but when we rise up together, we've got a fighting chance against the powers that be. 

And perhaps that realization is just a little bit scary for them."

"Drowning World" Photographer Has Striking Images Of Extreme Flood Victims

A lot of the scientists are telling us that among the many awful things climate change is causing is extreme storms and floods.

It isn't all heat and fires (See: Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada.)

The floods worldwide do see to be coming fast and furiously, seeming striking somewhere every week.

 Photographer Gideon Mendel has been going to many of these floods since 2007, taking him to places as diverse as Brazil, India, the United States, Britain, Nigeria and Thailand.

Mendel calls his project "a hazy middle groud between documentary and art, with a bit of activism thrown in."

He said most people think if climate change as involving distant glaciers melting or a stranded polar bear in the Arctic somewhere.

But Mendel says he wants to show that people are being affected in profound ways by climate change right now.

To do that, he poses people standing in the flood waters in or near their homes. He has them face the camera with pretty intense stares - as if to accuse all of us of contributing to the climate change that has devastated their lives.


These are the most effective photos that I've seen in his collection, I think. The expressions on the flood victims' faces are this terrible mix of pain, anger, sadness, resignation and defiance.

You can see a couple examples of these portraits in this post.  (Click on the images to make them bigger and really get a good look at them.)

Mendel also has many photos of water lines in homes, and images of people's personal photographs ruined by floodwater.  

Of course, each flood Mendel documents have many causes. But climate change is tending to make floods worse, so chances are the inundations he's showing are worse than what they otherwise would have been

H/T Washington Post for the this.

Here is a video of Mendel further explaining his project and showing more of his incredible images.

HUGE Throng at Climate March, But Will It Make A Difference?

Big crowds at the People's Climate March
Sunday in New York.  

The powers that be who keep track of such things  have pretty much settled on crowd estimates of 310,000 or so people who marched in Sunday's People's Climate March in New York City.

That's more than was generally expected, and together with a bunch of satellite marches worldwide, there was quite a turnout, to be sure.

One of the lead organizers, Bill McKibben, a climate activist (and fellow Vermonter!) said this was the largest demonstration by people concerned with climate change.

Which means theres a groundswell out there on the issue of climate change. The question is, will the New York march and all the other demonstrations make a difference? I frankly wonder.

My skepticism and cynicism isn't meant to insult or disparage all those people who took part in marches Sunday. If people feel strongly about anything, they should march in the streets, and the should make their voices heard.

I don't know if all these people marching would make an immediate change, but surely nothing would happen with regard to climate change policy if nobody marched.

So the People's Climate March was definitely a good thing.

Streets filled with climate demonstrators
in New York Sunday.  

Now, how will the policy makers react? This is where my cynicism kicks in. The march in New York was timed to coincide with a big United Nations meeting on climate. But the UN is pretty famous for putting out great reports on climate change, but not doing much on policy to combat it.

What about politicians?  Especially in the United States. Gridlock seems to have become a national tradition, especially in Congress, so nothing will happen, I fear.

This is especially the case because it's become a matter of faith, facts be damned, among both the conservatives and especially the Tea Party types that climate change is just a big hoax imposed on us by people who hate freedom.

Not to mention climate scientists who supposedly are raking in zillions of dollars in federal grants by studying climate change and sounding the alarm.

Like somebody's going to become a millionaire by poking probes into decaying ice fields in Greenland amid horrible weather for a few months.

But anyway, the conservatives. The very right wing Breitbart.com had the following headline for their People's Climate March story on Sunday: "Thousands Take To Streets Worldwide To Demand More Taxes, Less Energy."

That's the mindset we're working with, folks.  Supposedly serious policymakers actually believe headlines like that.  This is why I'm dubious about political leadership.

Well, then, maybe industry, business and many of those thousands of people, and others, will just make end runs around the obstinate politicians and take matters into their own hands. There does seem to be a thriving alternative energy industry popping up.    Investors, jobseekers and just about everybody else ought to like that.

The insurance industry, with a perfectly sensible eye on their bottom line, is taking climate change seriously.

But then you have Big Oil and those types, who are trying to preserve their business model, which means burning as much fossil fuel as possible.

I bring these up because industry does seem to have the lobbying power to control Congress, and thus policy. The only way we're going to seriously combat climate change is if the power of industry lobbyists sways more toward dealing with, rather than ignoring climate change.

I still wonder who will win this power game. Marches like the one on Sunday are a heads up there is some people power out there trying to sway things.

But as successful as Sunday's demonstrations were, the peaceful pressure from the likes of McKibben and all those placard waving marchers is going to have to continue and intensify.

Just like climate change itself.

Growing Civil Disobedience On Climate Change?

Will a big demonstration coming up soon
push the needle on climate change activism?  

Scientists, activists and others are getting very, very antsy on the lack of movement on climate change.

It looks like more and more people are ready to hit the streets to at least try and combat inaction on climate change.

Some of the political leaders are there, but things aren't happening because of an ideological stance among many conservatives that climate change doesn't exist, or isn't dangerous, or isn't something to worry about.

That leads to gridlock, and too few people are generating ideas or action plans on how to minimize the threats climate change pose.

Never mind that most climate scientists are getting more and more alarmed with regard to climate change.  There was the news this week, for example, that concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased at a record pace in 2013.

While we in the eastern half of United States were blessed with a cool summer and it's currently snowing in the Black Hills of South Dakota, that only amounts to a couple of exceptions.  (Even in the worst case scenarios of global warming forecasts, occasional cold waves will still happen. Winter won't be repealed.)

The world as a whole keeps warming, with most months so far this year placing in the top 10 warmest, if not THE warmest. Through July, the year 2014 was tied with 2002 as the third hottest year for the Earth on record. 

Meanwhile, there hasn't been much meaningful debate as to what to do about climate change. The debate among politicians is whether it's happening, or whether it's some strange conspiracy among climate scientists to rake in federal grant money or something.

Climate scientists recently lent
their name and quotes to distributing
facts about climate change.  

Hint:  A lot of scientists I've met tend to be ornery on occasion and love to bring up problematic facts.

If there were such a big conspiracy to grab the government dough, we would have heard someone loudly giving us proof of that by now.

With nothing else to force the issue, is it time for civil disobedience in regards to climate change?

A lot of people thing so.

It'll be interesting to see how many people show up on September 21 for what organizers hope is a major scene in New York City called the People's Climate March.

It's timed for September 21 because the UN is holding a major climate meeting on that day.

Say the organizers:  "We'll peacefully flood the streets in historic numbers, both in New York City and in solidarity events around the world."

I guess flooding the streets of New York with demonstrators is better than flooding the streets of New York with water from the Atlantic Ocean, due to rising sea levels.

A main organizer of the People's Climate March, journalist and activist (and a fellow Vermonter!) Bill McKibben, sure seems optimistic. He Tweeted yesterday: "Home in Middlebury tonite with a church full of people prepping for #climatemarch VT sending 14 buses!

Yeah, Vermont is full of activists, but not that many of us live here. So 14 buses is pretty impressive.

People's Climate also said they anticipate about 1,500 events in 130 countries to coincide with the New York march.

If the People's Climate March is huge, it could be a turning point, as political leaders will begin to feel more pressure to do something with climate change.

There's already some interesting local developments.  The other day, in Massachusetts, Bristol District Attorney C. Samuel Sutter dropped charges against two climate activists who blocked a 40,000 coal shipment to a local power plant.

Said Sutter, as quoted in the Boston Globe:  "Because of my sympathy with their position, I was in a dilemma... I have a duty to go forward to some extent with this case and to follow the applicable case law, but they were looking for a forum to present their very compelling case about climate change.

"I do believe they're right, that we're at a crisis point with climate change."

In other words, the D.A. decided that climate change is a worse problem than a couple of environmentalists delaying a coal shipment. He kinda put a stamp of approval on climate change civil disobedience.

Climate scientists are getting more and more outspoken, too. (Although some, like James Hansen and Michael Mann, are not exactly excessively shy with their warnings about climate change)

This past week, Skeptical Science did a series of online cartoons quoting climate scientists, who happily  lent their name to the cause, to outline lots of facts about climate change to the public.  So yeah, scientists seem to be getting a little more activist, too.

Meanwhile, a few former climate change deniers are starting to accept that climate change is happening. However, the disheartening piece of that is, many of those guys think that rising levels of carbon dioxide are a good thing.

According to the Washington Post, the  conservative Cato Institute thinks rising carbon levels in the atmosphere is cause for celebration.

The Post quotes Paul Knappenberger from the Cato Institute as follows:

"Carbon dioxide is building in the atmosphere and rising to levels that have probably not been seen in a long time (hundreds of thousands of years)

OK, Knappenberger's got that totally right. But he goes on:

"The rise is a continued reminder of the steady drumbeat of human progress. The carbon dioxide that is building in the atmosphere, at least in part, gets there through human emissions of carbon dioxide that are the by-product of burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) to produce the vast majority of the energy that has powered mankind's industrial and technical ascent since the Industrial Revolution."

Yes, the Industrial Revolution, all in all, generally worked out well for humans. But throughout millenia, humans have used things to advance civilization, then abandoned those things for something they discovered works better.

Is Knappenberger suggesting we should stay stuck in the Industrial Revolution and not move on to something that works better, something that minimizes the consequences of global warming that threatens human progress?  Should we not at least not look into technologies that might advance humans further?

Maybe it will take civil disobedience to help prove Knappenberger wrong.