September 25, 2015 Post 4

            Reading Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter this week, along with hearing Bernie Evans speak proved to be eye opening and genuinely pleasing experiences. However, it stirred up a conflict in my perceptions of the Catholic faith, causing me much distress. Let me elaborate here, while at the same time explaining the problem I see in regards to climate change.

            Being raised Catholic, I found myself to be unknowingly instilled with values that are fairly consistent with the current Pope’s. The encyclical letter highlighted key concepts present in the Catholic faith while discussing climate change. Pope Francis emphasized that all creatures are creatures of God and must be respected as such. The same goes for the planet. Each thing has value, even if that value is not anthropocentric or centered around humans. He also has a particular affinity for the poor and focuses on the idea that everyone has a right to a good life. These among other values mentioned in the letter seem commonsensical or at least logical to be held in the church.

As I grew up in a community filled with other “Catholics” I developed a negative connotation with followers of the religion. I carried a perception that they were a group of people who were discriminatory (harsh views on homosexuality), were not open to alternative viewpoints, and were ignorant of the current environmental problem. Now after reading the encyclical, I am left with hope that this is not the majority, but I do know that these people exist. Essentially, they hold views that I see as consistent with the Republican party in the United States, so I grew up having a strong association with Catholics and Republicans. In fact, last class period it was brought up that all of these Catholic Republican senators refused to attend the Pope’s address to congress. They did not attend because his views were too different from the church’s leader, especially on the climate change issue.

            This reaffirmation of my perception still troubled me. I cannot help but question why there is an association between the two. If others sat down to read the encyclical letter or another piece of deeper writing by the Pope, perhaps they would reassess the values they hold and compare them to those of the church. I feel that this could begin to cause some political change and although it's a long shot, maybe, just maybe we wouldn’t have someone in the running for president of the United States who doesn’t believe that anthropogenic climate change exists.

September 18, 2015 Post 3

            After beginning to delve into why climate matters and how climate affects culture, we experienced a shift in focus to the realm of climate science, courtesy of Troy Knight. As a whole, this topic was and in many ways still is pretty unfamiliar to me. It is almost needless to say that the amount of new information taken in from those two 70-minute class periods felt unprecedented. When discussing climate change before this week, my entire focus would have been based around the present and greenhouse gases. Professor Knight’s lectures broadened my horizon and showed me the importance of the past when studying climate change.

            The first lecture began with a large rough timeline of the Earth’s past beginning with its formation 4.55 billion years ago. The timeline provided many crucial events, including items such as when the first plants came into existence and when dominant mountain ranges blossomed from the Earth. Now, as fascinated as I was by all of this, I couldn’t help but wonder how this fit into the grand scheme of discussing climate change. Well quite frankly this was a bit dim-witted of me, as it helped give a basic understanding of how different big events shaped the Earth’s climate throughout history. The timeline provided examples of large-scale ice formations and their disappearances. It provided an explanation for why it rains in a place such as Seattle (thanks mountain formation!) and other things needed to help make sense of the truly important information that came next.

            When learning about the Earth’s past climate, a couple of concepts jumped out at me that I had never really contemplated before. The first being the planet’s history with ice. Perhaps the most valuable piece of knowledge from the first part of the lecture was the fact that ice periods are constantly in flux. Throughout history, our quantity of ice has been constantly changing, largely due to the Earth’s distance from the sun as well as its imperfect orbit. It is an accepted fact that the Earth is spherical in shape; therefore, the sun hits different places with different amounts and intensities of sunlight. The planet also orbits the sun in an ellipse. The sun is not in the center of this ellipse at all times and this creates a close pass and far pass for the Earth. These two concepts when paired with the fact that the Earth is tilted creates a variance in sunlight intensity. Over time, these variations trigger natural ice formation and melt. This is a pretty minimalist explanation but when talking about climate change it is important to recognize this phenomenon. The rate of the melt can be compared to past events and result in further indication that human use of fossil fuels are accelerating this process.

            However, if this meager explanation wasn’t enough to begin to show a climate change denier that humans are accelerating the natural processes, Professor Knight when on to disprove different theories as to why the Earth is warming so rapidly. I always knew these other ideas were absurd, but could never begin prove why. Some possible explanations deniers may use for the warming include issues with the sun, the plant’s orbit, albedo, and global circulation. Professor Knight did admit that yes, stars such as the sun do experience an increase in temperature throughout their existence, but this would only account for at best, 0.1°C of the 0.8°C temperature rise.

Another common argument he shot down quickly was, “volcano explosions release far more CO² into the atmosphere than humans.” This in fact false. Volcano eruptions actually create a cooling effect as they release large amounts of SO², creating sulfate aerosols that actually reduce the amount of solar radiation that reaches Earth.

Ultimately the Environmental Studies professor’s visit led to an overload of information on climate history that sparked a new interest for me. I find myself driven to learn more about the climate history and science to increase my persuasive efforts when talking about climate change. As I move along the Communication major here at SJU, I am very interested in changing the way the issue of climate change is framed and I believe this could be another step in attempting to do so.

September 9, 2015 Post 2

            This week’s reading comes from Jessica Barnes’ and Michael R. Dove’s Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change. The second chapter focuses on four regions – The Arctic, islands, deserts, and mountains – when talking about “How Long-Standing Debates Have Shaped Recent Climate Change Discourses.” Each region is devoted a small portion of text to show the view larger society had in the past and how each view has evolved. Each of the four showed significance; whether it was in regards to culture (desert) or expansion/resources (islands), each has been extremely important to the growth of the world’s nations.

            What struck me to be exceedingly interesting (and equally confusing) was the next section that highlighted the regions’ part in influencing climate discourse. The four regions were granted pages explaining the histories of their influence in the discourse; a large portion of this included the summary of the creation of their various alliances. Last post, I wrote a small portion on environmental injustice and that concept reappeared when talking about these regions, particularly islands. Numerous groups such as AOSIS (Alliance Of Small Island States), SIDS (Small Island Developing States), worked towards gaining further recognition to the particular problem of sea-level rise that is currently in the process of engulfing these island states. This push led to the Global Conference on the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States as well as the dedications of multiple chapters in the IPCC reports to the issue. However, despite all of this action, little influence is inflicted upon climate policy frameworks or institutions.

            As my mind was boggled after reading this, I realized that their lack of economic and political power was the reason for the lack of influence. In class we watched the film, Sun Come Up, in which, there was a scene that hit me very hard and felt very reflective of the points brought up in the chapter. The Carteret people that were forced to abandon their island home had to make desperate appeals to members of a nearby nation in hopes of acquiring land to live. Not only could they do nothing about the original problem, which was the result of wealthier more industrialized nations, they were not taken seriously when describing the severity of their condition. How can one’s heart not hurt after hearing of the real life impacts of relocation, starvation, and loss of culture? Shouldn’t this be persuasive enough in either realm, whether it is at climate conferences or in the relief nations? Let’s hope that they hold a little more power in the upcoming climate conference.

-Jordan Narloch

September 4, 2015 Post I

For the first blog entry in a series of many, I will be focusing on articles by Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, as they were a part of The Guardian’s recent series on climate change. Being an aspiring journalist, a few things really struck me about the way in which these pieces were done and about what points they discussed.

            Klein’s piece from This Changes Everything was brave in its admission to (at least, formerly) being a climate change denier. In fact it raises the point that nearly all of us are in denial. She goes on to say that, “We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right.” This is an interesting and all too real perspective. It raises awareness to the reader that simply living a better, more eco-friendly lifestyle yourself is not enough. Instead, there must nearly be a revolution to change the industry and our policies to work towards a more sustainable future. Big changes need to happen and not contributing to them, thinking that personal change or belief that someone else will go and fix the problem later on is a form of ignorance. You are looking away from the problem whether or not you know it.

            As Dr. O’Reilly mentioned in class, McKibben’s article, Pressure is growing. A relentless climate movement is starting to win big, unprecedented victories around the world, victories which are quickly reshaping consensus, is a refreshing take on the climate change article. Rather than being the typical, “Here is this new study and some scientists and one denier who have opinions on it,” McKibben chooses to focus on the small victories and how they are important to the next climate summit in Paris. He reinforces what Klein touches on a bit, by giving examples of how ordinary people collectively brought about change such as University divestment, bans on fracking, and the prevention of four new coal ports that were once planned to be built in Wyoming.

            He also talks about environmental injustice, which is an issue I would love to look at a little more closely. Essentially climate change is affecting nations and groups of people that carry less political and industrial power more heavily. They are paying the prices for our blunders and as of now I have heard of few solutions for this. Possibly making the jump to renewable energies would build up the economies of the nations, giving them power, but they would need the funds to begin this process first. I am extremely interested to see how this play out in the Paris negotiations.

            Ultimately, I feel that these are excellent examples of environmental journalism and am excited to read more of these and get to the essence of the importance of media when talking about climate change.

-Jordan Narloch