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.

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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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Welcome to our course blog!  I’m Stephen Siperstein, the instructor of this course, and I am excited that we will be using a blog as a way to explore the topic of climate change fiction and to communicate with each other. One purpose of the blog is to widen our discussion beyond the classroom.  The realities of climate change confront us daily, and a blog will provide a forum for bringing the questions we discuss in class to bear on a wide range of media, texts, and other conversations that we all encounter outside of class.  We’ll also use the blog to seed our discussions in class, and to open new directions of inquiry that are not necessarily on the syllabus.

Here are a few examples of blogs from other environmental literature courses.  Before you write your first post, I would suggest taking a look at some of the posts on these sites to get an idea of the many possibilities for different kinds of blog posts (a blog post is its own kind of literary genre):

http://blogs.uoregon.edu/environmentalliterature230/ 

http://aml24101614.wordpress.com/

http://eng670.wordpress.com/

If you ever need help with technical questions relating to the blog, email me (siperste@uoregon.edu), or contact the Information Services Help Desk at 541-346-HELP or helpdesk@uoregon.edu.

Welcome to the course and looking forward to a great term.