I grew up being aware of what climate change was, but it was never a topic that my parents talked with me in depth about. Understanding what climate change is and how it is affecting our planet is actually quite scary. Everyday I feel like there is a new way in which climate change is affecting our world, slowly, but gradually at a constant rate.

While reading A Fable for Tomorrow and Time Capsule Found on a Dead Planet, I realized that there are many people in our world that understand how large and serious of an issue climate change is. A Fable for Tomorrow is a fictional short story about a town that does not exist and has a sequence of events occur, but most the events that happen in the story do exist today. Time Capsule Found on a Dead Planet is a fictional story as well that discusses the different things we have created over time on our planet and how those various things have affected our planet. Both of these stories are very powerful because they are both relatable to our everyday lives even though they are fictional.

After reading both of these short stories, I was shocked by how many of the events they referred to related to events that I have heard about worldwide. In Time Capsule Found on a Dead Planet the author explains, “Towers of glass rose are its name, were destroyed and rose again. It began to eat things. It ate whole forests, croplands, and the lives of children” (Atwood 192). This quote made me instantly think of industrialization because that has been one of the main causes for climate change. It is really scary topic to think about because if people would have realized it was an issue sooner, then there may have been a way that we could fix it and prevent it from happening any longer.

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Prior to this class, I thought of climate change just as weather changing in a particular area over a period of time. I was soon informed from our class discussions and the introduction of Mark Maslin’s book Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction, that climate has evolved in more than just a scientific term. We are now approaching climate to affect our economy, sociology, geopolitics, health, law, and local and national areas. However another problem we have with climate change is the inability to predict the future (Maslin 69.) Cli-fi genre has thus provided us with possibilities of climate changing if climate were to become more problematic than it already is.

The two stories we read in I’m with the Bears, along with the Global Weirding website provided me with particular cases of what would happen if our climate problem was to get worse. With that and learning more about cli-fi genre I was curious to find out more about the possibilities that could happen to me, locally. Mark Maslin made another point in his Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction book was that “Humanity can live, survive, and even flourish in extreme climates… each society has a coping range, a range of weather with which it can deal (Maslin 71.) Living in Oregon almost all of my life I can live, survive, and even flourish with rain and cold unlike someone who lives in the Sahara. I was curious to know if I could then be able to survive if Oregon were to change entirely.

http://www.keeporegoncool.org/content/oregons-climate was a website I found myself on that provided climate information about the present and future predictions of Oregon’s global warming. I was shocked to find out the facts of what is happening throughout Oregon now. Our average temperatures are rising, snowpack’s slowly declining, and sea level are rising an inch every 15 years. The video below provided great visual connection for me to see what was happening and the climate predictions.  I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to see these predictions come true.

Keep Oregon Cool also provides great insight on what we can do in order to reduce extreme climate change possibilities. I found myself then wondering what my lifestyle habits were doing to global warming. I came across a carbon footprint calculator that detects your greenhouse gas emissions through household size, transportation, consumption of foods, goods, and services: http://www.deq.state.or.us/programs/sustainability/carboncalculator.htm

At the end it gives you a list of actions you can take in order to reduce your carbon footprint. I was a little shocked at all the things I could do in order to contribute to our climate change issue. Its amazing how little things like going organic to changing your faucets can improve! Just within the last two weeks of activities we were asked to do, readings, and class discussions, I have definitely opened my mind about climate change.

Work Cited:

Maslin, Mark.  Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2014. 1 & 62-71. Print.

“Oregon’s Climate” Keep Oregon Cool. Oregon Global Warming Commission.  Web. 13 Jan. 2015.

My first thoughts on Global Warming in this class were climate change and how the world will cope. I didn’t quite understand how fiction could be created through this; however, through the texts that we have already begun to learn about I have noticed how broad the spectrum is and how texts can definitely help inform, prepare and warn society for what may come.

A proverb that I think personally a lot of people use in regards to Global Warming and what I was reminded of when first entering this class is “Ignorance is bliss”. I myself find it hard to be confronted with sites such as Global Weirding simply because I feel the issue is so colossal that it feels too large to handle. While I understand that there are motions in action to try and prevent Global Warming from happening I find it hard to personally feel as though I can make much of a difference. For a lot of people I honestly believe they would feel the same way and just pretend things aren’t happening because they feel so disconnected from the issue. I believe that writers have an obligation to educate the public on certain issues, in this case Global Warming. This is why I’m not quite sure if I overly enjoyed the short story A Diary of an Interesting Year by Helen Simpson. The idea itself I enjoyed however I personally did not agree with some of the craft elements Simpson uses throughout. The concept of a diary is interesting and I think it works in a lot of stories such as The Perks of Being A Wallflower By Stephan Chbosky and The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll however in this short story I really didn’t feel connected to the main character. I don’t know if this is because it’s a much shorter story or it was simply the style that it was written but I just couldn’t connect with her as much as I did with other characters from other stories in I’m With The Bears.

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I never really grasped the total effects of climate change. I knew it was happening, and I knew that it wasn’t good, but I never really thought of it as something that would directly affect me. In fact, I didn’t realize that the more sever effects would take place in my lifetime. While examining Global Weirding (http://globalweirding.is/here), I began to have a sinking feeling in my stomach. I was surprised to observe that Climate Change was already beginning to have significant effects on the world right now, and even back in 2013-14. We have had the three warmest decades in a row in recorded history, which shocked me in a way, as there is quite a bit of recorded history.

Another aspect of climate change that I wasn’t aware of was that there could be intense flooding as a result of more precipitation from the evaporation of water. In fact, in North America, there could me more extreme weather events like storms or flooding due to this phenomenon. I think the some of the reasons the website might be called Global Weirding is due to the more strange and obscure events that many of us didn’t expect, like the increased spread of aquatic pathogens or that power plants could have problems with excess jellyfish due to increased reproduction because of higher acidity of the oceans due to carbon absorption.

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I think one of the main issues with climate change is that people do not acknowledge it or recognize it as a problem. I think this could be a result of the way people are informed about global warming. As I was able to see, a lot of the information that is presented about climate change is fact and is presented as fact. Our climate change introduction book and the global weirding website are an example of this. While these were both very helpful in finding out information and learning more about the effects of global warming, if I was not taking a class about climate change or if I did not have interest in the topic, I probably would not have been very interested in the factual evidence that both of these sources present. I think this is a problem that a lot of people have when they are told about global warming, they do not connect with the information.

On the other hand, the stories not only tell of what could happen but they introduce a whole new way to learn about climate change, through emotion. As I read the stories from I’m With the Bears, I could not help but begin to be more concerned about the issue of climate change. While the facts have always worried me just like they do most people, I was able to see the problem in a completely new light. Although these stories are just scenarios that could happen, they showed the effects that climate change could have on people and that was what made me truly worry. Reading the Diary of an Interesting Year took the issue to a whole new level. This woman seemed to have lost all hope. She just accepted every bad thing that happened to her without question or emotion. The fact that climate change could bring people to that point is a thought that had never crossed my mind before. This story not only showed what could happen but also allowed the reader to connect emotionally which is something that is hard to do with this topic in some cases. Most people realize the effects that climate change will have on the environment but do not necessarily recognize how much it will affect them on every level. This story was able to get both points across.

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