You searched for ''cli-fi''

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Climate Change 67

News Coverage of Coal’s Link to Global Warming, in 1912

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Various updates | Scientific analysis pointing to a human role in warming the climate through burning fossil fuels goes back to 1896, with Svante Arrhenius’s remarkable paper, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid [Carbon Dioxide] in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.”
Starting in the late 1930s, Guy Stewart Callendar, a British engineer and amateur meteorologist, stirred the field by calculating that rising carbon dioxide levels were already warming the climate. Check out his 1938 paper on the subject: “The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature.”
By 1956, The New York Times was writing on combustion-driven global warming.
But when did news coverage begin?
The earliest (and most concise!) article I’ve seen was published on Aug. 14, 1912, in a couple of New Zealand newspapers, the Rodney and Otamatea Times and Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette:  Read more…
Climate Change 105

Building Visions of Humanity’s Climate Future – in Fiction and on Campus

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At Arizona State University, Julie Primozich kept a graphic record as scientists discussed how to design a program to manage planet-scale systems and limit future risks. Andrew C. Revkin
Earlier this week I spoke at Arizona State University on ways to pursue a least-regrets approach to human development. My talk (building on one you can watch here) launched an interdisciplinary workshop on developing the capacity to manage the climate system in the face of relentlessly rising emissions of greenhouse gases.*
The university already has initiatives on everything from “urban resilience to extremes” to “negative emissions” — developing ways to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in amounts large enough to matter at climate scale. (Think billions of tons a year, a scale that the Paris climate agreement presumes, without much evidence, will be possible later this century.)
But leaders of the university’s sustainability initiatives want to inspire more cross-cutting collaborations, particularly including the humanities and social sciences. There’s plenty to draw on there. How many schools have an “Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative“?
That kind of linkage is essential given the mix of values and science that will implicitly shape human pursuits in the decades and centuries ahead. It was invigorating to join an array of scholars and students stepping out of their disciplinary silos to grapple with overarching questions like these:  Read more…
arts 55

‘Extreme Whether’ Explores the Climate Fight as a Family Feud

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In "Extreme Whether," a play on climate change by Karen Malpede, a family feud erupts as a brother in law invested in fossil fuels is confronted by nature-loving relatives. Beatriz Schiller
If you’re in the New York metropolitan region, I encourage you to see “Extreme Whether,” an pioneering and brave effort by playwright and director Karen Malpede to use theater to explore the clashing passions around human-driven global warming and our fossil fuel fixation. There are a few more performances in the play’s initial run at Theater for the New City, many with an invited guest discussing the climate challenge after the show (see the list at the end of this post).
I recently saw the play and spoke afterward. You can see excerpts from my conversation with the audience (and mini concert) below.
“Extreme Whether” is a refreshing experiment in bringing the emerging fictional genre called “cli-fi” to a theatrical stage. (Another example is “2071,” coming next month at the Royal Court Theatre in London.)
Malpede’s play is laced with darkness and humor, even in the double meaning of the word “whether” in the title — which I found nicely reflects the deep uncertainty that still surrounds the worst-case outcomes from the continuing buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The play centers on a fractured family that is a stand-in for the human family writ large. John Bjornson, a crusading climate scientist modeled closely on the retired NASA scientist Jim Hansen, is muzzled by political appointees and betrayed by his twin sister and brother in law — both of whom are blinded to looming environmental danger by their investments in fossil fuels. His foes conspire to drill for gas on a shared family estate. Bjornson, a widower, is buoyed by a student who’s become an important Arctic expert (and his lover), and his nature-loving daughter and an elderly uncle who is the estate caretaker take up arms against the gas-drilling plan.
Survivors grapple with overwhelming heat in an epilogue, but with hints of an alternative future in projected images of wind turbines.
As with any experiment, there are flaws. Read more…
future 148

Three Long Views of Life With Rising Seas

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A design for a coastal city that grows much of its own food, created by DeltaSync, a Dutch firm focused on "water-based urban development." DeltaSync
After finishing my post on the inevitability of substantial long-term sea-level rise from Antarctic ice loss, I sent this question to Curt Stager, a paleoclimatologist and author of “Deep Future,” Kim Stanley Robinson, the novelist focused on “cli fi” before that term was conceived, and the astrobiologist David Grinspoon:
Given your focus on long timescales, environmental change and the human journey, I’m wondering if you might do quick riffs on how humans — in your view — will most likely deal with this?
Here are their responses: Read more…
communication 100

Face to Face With Blog Contributors: Can Familiarity Breed Conviviality?

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[Production note | I’m taking eight Pace University students to Brazil for 10 days starting tonight (to make a film on tourism and the environment) so comment moderation and posting may be sporadic.]
Nearly six years ago, I first encouraged Dot Earth readers to enliven and, to some extent, humanize and tame this conversation about the human journey by offering short YouTube greetings that could serve as a calling card. Here’s Wang Suya, who was the first such contributor:

I’d like to revive this option. While some say familiarity breeds contempt, my sense is that, on the whole, it does more to produce civility. (Read what Charles Darwin said about this back in 1871.)
Anonymous commentary is not banned here in part because some people, for professional or other reasons, can’t weigh in freely under their real names. (A fine New Yorker post digs in on the benefits and downside of anonymity on the Internet.) But I’m a fan of rewarding authentic, constructive discourse, as I sometimes do through the “Your Dot” feature.
I’ll do what I can to boost the visibility of those who take things a step further and show themselves as living, moving, feeling human beings. Below you can meet more YouTube contributors from the early days. Consider joining them.  Read more…