climate change

On November 13, 2012, The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication reported that 88 percent of Americans now say they support action on climate change, even if it imposes economic costs. This is a huge change of heart for the American public compared to just a few years ago.

Why the sudden change? According to an article in Psychology Today, “Why America Changed Its Mind on Global Warming”: “People's perceptions of global warming shifted markedly, because the issue came to affect them intimately and locally. In the process, climate change ceased to be cerebral, wonky, and scientific — and became up close and personal.”

Mountainfilm in Telluride festival director David Holbrooke splits his time between Telluride, Colorado and Brooklyn, New York. What follows is his post Sandy dispatch from Brooklyn.

It’s been a little more than a week since Superstorm Sandy walloped the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut tri-state area, and it’s now snowing outside as I write. Suffering from cabin fever, I headed out earlier this evening into our neighborhood. It feels like February and walking past still-closed subway stations, a mid-winter sensation of cold air hit my face, reminding me of ski season.

Frequent Mountainfilm in Telluride guest Bill McKibben recently wrote a piece for Rolling Stone Magazine that he considers the most important thing he has written in 20 years. The piece re-contextualizes the way we look at the carbon we put in the air and how it affects our climate.

Sometimes it seems that the planet is being increasingly divided between forces that want to extract and exploit resources and those that want to conserve them. This conflict is only growing more pronounced as increased needs for energy, minerals and other resources, lead to extraction and development in places where it has never occurred before.

Mongolia, once a distant and exotic land, is now experiencing a land rush as multinational corporations descend on it, trying to get their shovels into its rich and virgin ground. This has created a local redistribution of wealth as some Mongolians get on the money train, while others are decidedly left standing. As this article in The New York Times suggests, Mongolia needs to manage this transition thoughtfully or else it will end up like Nigeria with severe societal schisms and dislocations.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), March 2012 set temperature records that dominated the eastern two-thirds of the nation and contributed to the warmest March on record for the contiguous United States since 1895. Last month, more than 15,000 temperature records were broken.

It’s easy to glaze over when hearing these alarm bells, but here are a few direct statements from NOAA’s “State of the Climate National Overview March 2012” that might hit home.

Bill McKibben of 350.org finds inspiration in Tim DeChristopher’s message, which he summaries as “Do more. Dig deeper. Don’t be afraid.” McKibben’s Orion blog, “Dig Deeper,” discusses how the environmental movement had lost impact and needed new tactics. With climate change as the current challenge, the timing for the environmental movement’s power loss was unfortunate, but DeChristopher’s actions have enlivened the cause and sparked activism on new levels.

For more from Orion about Tim DeChristopher, check out Terry Tempest Williams’ interview, “What Love Looks Like.”

The possibility of a Third Industrial Revolution is likely, argues Wharton Business School professor Jeremy Rifkin in this Huffington Post piece. He argues that the conditions needed for this historical shift - a new energy source and a new communication medium - are here, just like "steam-powered print technology became the communication medium to manage the coal-fired rail infrastructure" of the 19th century and "electronic communications - the telephone and later, radio and television - became the communication medium to manage and market the oil-powered auto age and the mass consumer culture of the Second Industrial Revolution."

Mountainfilm 2009 and 2011 guest Bill McKibben has become one of the leading environmental writers and activists, organizing the recent Keystone XL protest at the White House. He recently published an op-ed in The Washington Post about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. Now filmmaker Stephen Thomson has combined McKibben's words with striking footage of the events he writes about. The result is powerful.

Tornadoes, fires, floods, crop failures—they’re all isolated events, right? This powerful video from Bill McKibben and Stephen Thomson helps connect the dots of the climate catastrophe.

Al Gore penned a piece in the recent issue of Rolling Stone that eloquently addresses the "climate of denial"

From Rolling Stone:

The first time I remember hearing the question "is it real?" was when I went as a young boy to see a traveling show put on by "professional wrestlers" one summer evening in the gym of the Forks River Elementary School in Elmwood, Tennessee.

"The Earth is Full." That's the title of Thomas Friedman's latest piece in The New York Times, in which he reminds us of the serious effects caused by our growth as a species, and how "full" we've become.

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?