When I think about global warming, I relive the memories when I witnessed melting glaciers and rising water levels flooding villages; however, most people in America haven’t been able to see these effects first hand. Consequently, creating action to inhibit emissions and start helping the environment is hard because most people can’t connect the news headlines to personal experiences. This is where writers and short stories come into play. In the introduction to the collection of short stories titled I’m With The Bears, Bill Mckibben writes, “Of course, in the end, the job of writers is not to push us in some particular direction; it’s to illuminate. To bear witness” (4). By using the word “illuminate” Mckibben almost personifies the word into meaning that it gives life to a cause; that these writers are able to grab the soul of their audience and make them passionate about global warming simply based on fiction. This powerful writing is strewn throughout the book, but the story which burns brightest to me is Time Capsule Found On The Dead Planet by Margaret Atwood.

This short story by Margaret Atwood should be a required story for everyone in America to read and here’s why. I believe that this story puts mankind and humanity, as we know it today, in the perspective of an outsider. Also, it allows the reader to relate to the people in the story, allowing the reader to create emotion. First off, when describing the first age, Atwood describes our creation of Gods by saying, “We carved them out of wood; there was still such a thing as wood, then. We forged them from shining metals and painted them on temple walls” (191). By opening up the story and using words like “wood”, “shining metals”, and “temple walls” it immediately makes us think of ourselves. Not only is this an accurate account of what humans used to do, but it makes the reader feel as if they are looking in the mirror. This is essential in creating a personal experience because without this mirror-like effect, it is impossible to make the reader feel emotion if they can’t see themselves in the world described in the story.

During the second and third age, Atwood sets up modern society and humanity. In the second age, Atwood describes how money is created and, even though it is still very mysterious, it is thought to have had special powers. Then, in the third age, Atwood goes on to describe how, “It was all-powerful, and out of control. It began to talk…It created greed and hunger…towers of glass rose at its name, were destroyed and rose again” (192). By describing money as “all-powerful”, being able to “talk”, and how it created “greed and hunger”, Atwood alludes to money as a God. This allusion is essential to the “illumination” that writers are trying to accomplish. By making money appear as a God, it helps the reader reflect on society and its issues. In day-to-day life, most people think of money as a necessary component, not an issue, but when we are able to remove ourselves and look down upon society through this story, we can observe all its issues through a clear lens.  Contine reading →

I have been in this class about climate change for about two weeks now. I have read multiple stories about climate change and what the future may hold for the human race. Most of them are bleak, miserable futures, with environments deteriorating in barren wastelands, and society along with it. I quote an example from the short story “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet”:

“In the fourth age we created deserts. Our deserts were of several kinds, but they had one thing in common: nothing grew there. Some were made of cement, some were made of various poisons, some of baked earth. We made these deserts from the desire for more money and from despair at the lack of it. Wars, plagues and famines visited us, but we did not stop in our industrious creation of deserts. At last all wells were poisoned, all rivers ran with filth, all seas were dead; there was no land left to grow food.”

This describes a possible future where the land becomes bone-dry deserts, and the seas becoming poisoned and rotten. And yet, despite all these morbid stories, I don’t feel afraid about the future. The human race is a resilient and adaptable species, and will more than likely live on after the worst of the “global wierding.”

Sure, if the ice caps are lost, then sea levels will rise. Coastal cities will be flooded. Florida will be a thing of the past. Temperatures will swing from sweltering hot summers to freezing winters. Some places of the world will become more productive for plant life, while others will become less productive. Some animal species will become extinct. Others will thrive in new environments.

We can work with all of this.  Contine reading →

I’ve been following climate change and its effects for years now through various news publications and documentaries. It seems that every year, scientists from around the world, release more and more evidence supporting the fact that ‘global weirding’ will not only happen, but is happening as we speak. After these reports trickle out, get passed around the Internet bloggersphere, and garner a few precious minutes on various network news segments, I watch eagerly in anticipation of some sort of social uprising or massive political and economic shift towards saving the planet. Yet, year after year, society sees the evidence, panics for a second, and then moves on as if forgetting about the research will somehow make it untrue. I always ask myself “Why does no one seem to care? This is THE most important issue in the entire world. If we don’t address it, there won’t even BE a world.”

I’ve asked a few of my close friends about this and I mostly get the same answer: “Dude, there’s nothing I (as in individuals) can do to really change things. It’s a lost cause.” That passive type of thinking is not only a massive cop-out, but also the reason why no one tries to change anything. If everyone thinks they won’t have an effect, then no one will actually try to change the way things are.

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Global Warming is something we are all familiar with, whether that be we understand that it is happening, we heard about it in science class, family parties or so on, we all have a level of familiarity with the idea of global warming. Yet, we as a society are all blissfully ignorant about what is actually happening to our world. We turn our backs to the mere fact that our world temperature is literally rising, as we know it. Little did we know, that we are not only heating up, but there are endless reactions that will occur if we don’t step in and make a change. We turn our backs because we excuse ourselves from the problem, by simply believing that there is no way we can change Earths course, yet there is.

In order to truly assess and hopefully tackle a problem such as global warming we have to first understand what we can do to change it or in this case slow it down. In Margaret Atwood’s text, Time capsule found on the dead planet she describes our world in ages, beginning with the creation of gods progressing to the creation of money, and ending with deserts. In my opinion she shows this progression, to appeal to our emotional side. Personally, it scared me because as we discussed in class, we are somewhere lost in the middle of the third age. It is especially relevant because Money rules our world, and I think she intends to make a correlation between how we first idolized gods, and migrated to idolizing money. Unfortunately that is the world we live in, in a world where our motives are fully powered by the idolization, and chase of money. This is just one of the many distractions that keep us enthralled and ignorant to global warming.

Yet I firmly believe that if everyone took a second out of their day to visit the Global Weirding website it would change 99% of peoples perspective and willingness to make a change for the benefit of our universe. Contine reading →

I am so fortunate to call the beautiful city of San Diego my home. However, during May 2014 San Diego, California faced an eruption of 20 wildfires. These wildfires burned almost 30,000 acres and cost the city over $60 million dollars. Many of these fires were due to the impact of the high changing climate.

A study conducted by the college UCSD states that by 2050 San Diego sea levels will be 12-18 inches higher, the climate will be hotter and drier, will face a severe water shortage, wildfires will be more frequent and intense, will not be able to meet energy needs, native plant and animal species will be lost forever, and public health will be at risk, especially among the elderly and children (http://meteora.ucsd.edu). What is scary to think about is that there are still 35 years until 2050 but a majority of these climate-changing results have already begun. This website also explains that about 70 miles of beach will be lost which will overall affect the economy since San Diego relies so heavily on beach towns as a major source of revenue. But not only is climate change affecting the city of San Diego, but also the world.

The book Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction by Mark Maslin discusses the current and future climate changing impacts that will affect the globe. The potential impacts the world could face include sea level rising, an increase of storms and floods, more heat waves and droughts, a growth in diseases, and loss of biodiversity and agriculture (Maslin 68). However, I think the biggest problem with climate change is that people hardly realize that it’s actually happening. Contine reading →

Climate change is something that is happening right now in this day and age. Just by being in this class within the last week, I have learned so much more and have become more aware about climate change. The readings that were assigned for the first class, I really enjoyed. The stories “A Fable for Tomorrow” and the story by Margaret Atwood, “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” were both very similar but different at the same time.They both have similar messages that they are trying to convey that the human race is to blame for global warming. Although I inferred the same message from the two stories they were both diverse than one another. “A Fable for Tomorrow” was more of an imaginative story, that created a clear picture of the land that was eventually destroyed. In the story, “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” I though it was more of a dark interesting way of view on society. After we were assigned the blog post of Global Weirding, I really started to think that these stories are really implying that we are the reason global warming is happening. The way that the Global Weirding sight really scared me because it was so real and made me start thinking that if our society does not make a change then our planet will soon have so much damage no human can fix. That really scares me. These two stories really connected with me once I started looking really in depth to the blog. One part that I really connected to in Margaret Atwood’s story in age three, when it says, “money became a God. It was all powerful and out of control” (192). This quote really opened my eyes because it is true that our society cares a huge amount of their life to money. Throughout my life I just have noticed people that have only wanted to do what makes them the most money and not what is the right thing to do. I think this is such a big issue in our country that needs to be fixed, but I know that it probably won’t be. Our planet is so important to everyone that lives on it, and it seems like (at least to me) that no one really caring about the climate change that is happening to OUR planet that we live on. The other assignment we had to do was find out what was happening to our hometowns. I am from Orange County, Ca and when I looked up what was happening to Orange County it really scared me and hit home because this is where I grew up and where I have lived my whole life, and seeing the increase for wildfires is about to rise immensely, and that the sea level rises nearly everyday is a scary thought, because no one ever thinks this is going to happen to them. I personally was never really aware about what is going on in our planet until I started this class. Climate change is something that everyone needs to be aware of, and people need to start making it aware to everyone.

I want to first talk about in this blog entry what Bill McKibben was addressing in the introduction of Im With the Bears. He talked about why it is important to write about climate change. I found it very interesting how he brought up the idea that we need to write about climate change so that people feel more urgent about it. A lot of our people are still unaware about what is happening to our world and what we have to do with it. (To be honest I recently became aware about climate change and how much of an impact we could have on it.) So, by writing these fictional stories people can imagine what our world will be like eventually because of climate change. People are not taking it seriously now because climate change is not affecting them in the present. By reading these stories it brings climate change to reality. They can start to see the long term effects that climate change can have on our world. People can hear facts about climate change all day long but they will actually start to listen when you bring real life situations and emotions that they can understand.

While I agree that our world today is not taking climate change seriously and should be informed on what our future will look like if we do not change; so far with all of the stories we have read, they have all been very pessimistic and scary. I wonder if using these stories as scare tactics is the only way to get people to notice that climate change is important. To be honest, when I read stories like Diary of an Interesting Year by Helen Simpson and see movies like 2012, it makes me terrified of what our future holds. Although this fear is effective in making me think about climate change it gives me no hope and leads me to believe that our world will ends without our control and we will all end up being either miserable, sick, poor, or dead. It seems that we could approach this in a different way. By now we have already caused lasting effects on this world so what if we started to write stories that would uplift the audience and cause them to want to help the world.  What if we wrote a story about the effects of climate change and our world getting through it and persevering. In my opinion, when you leave an audience stripped of their hope it does not motivate them to want to change their ways and stop climate change. Even if it does it gives them no place to go afterwards. We need to start writing things that can spark solution. Although I wonder if my thoughts our too naive. Maybe saying that we can inspire the audience through wanting to help our world just by the kindness and hopefulness in our heart will never happen. Do you think that scaring the audience will end up helping the fight against climate change? Or are there other ways to approach this such as providing a solution or giving hope to the audience?

This class brings up many arguments about climate change. Climate change is a serious subject that is often times pushed aside as something that is not a worry at the moment and that people will worry about it when it gets worse. This however is not the case. As we saw in the global weirding project and discussed in class, even if everyone was on board and acted the best they could to prevent further pollution and greenhouse gasses going into the environment, the results of global warming are not reversible by these actions. As we discussed, the greenhouse gasses that are already in the environment will continue to warm the atmosphere, damage has already been done. There are ways though to slow the amounts of the greenhouse gasses that are going into the environment, and we as humans need to do as much as we can. Last Sunday I read an article in the newspaper about the disregard for this need written by Alan Journet titled, “Jordan Cove Analysis Ignores Climate Change”. In this article he discussed a new pipeline that a group wants to build to carry natural gas.

The author of the article is clearly one who is concerned about global warming, but he explains other reasons as to why this pipeline is a bad idea to build other than the environment, showing that it should not be built. He explains that the pipelines that exist are not being used to full capacity, and that there is no new sources of natural gas being made so there is no need for a new pipeline. As far as the environment is concerned he argues that the pipeline would endanger the environment more than do any help for humans. He explains that natural gas is methane which is a greenhouse gas, so if there is any leak then a green house has is escaping straight to than environment. He uses this to argue that natural gas pipelines are much more dangerous than coal or oil because natural gas is already in the state of a greenhouse gas where coal and oil have to go through a chemical reaction first before they are a greenhouse gas.

Contine reading →