Are We Finally Going to do Something About Climate Change?

In 2002, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a document entitled “Climate Change and Biodiversity.” The study provides statistical information in order to construct the impact that climate change has on biodiversity. To put it simply, climate change negatively impacts biodiversity. And people caused climate change; therefore humans are also responsible for the rapidly growing disruption of biodiversity. Newer statistics can be found on NASA’s website. 

(Image: NOAA)

It’s been 12 years since the IPCC released that specific study and climate change is anything but a new concern, nor has it been improved at all, but perhaps it’s finally time for us do to something about it.

This past Tuesday, world leaders from nearly 200 countries around the world met at the UN in New York City to discuss the issue of climate change, which is becoming more and unavoidable worldwide. (A live feed of the entire event can be found here.) Despite its urgency, this is the first time leaders have formally discussed this issue in five years, when Barack Obama, Angela Merkel of Germany, Manmohan Singh for India, the UK’s Gordon Brown and others failed negotiate the issuesuccessfully enough to enact change in Copenhagen.

Before the failed Copenhagen summit, Wired.com writer Brandon Keim released an article entitled “The Psychology of Climate Change Denial.”

Keim draws attention to an announcement by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate in 2007, which warned that depending on human energy habits, the world’s temperature would rise between 1.5 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.  Even a midrange change in climate would likely cause catastrophic natural consequences.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon opened up the summit amongst powerful world leaders with the statement “we are not here to talk. We are here to make history.” Although no international solution on climate change action was reached, it did create the atmosphere (no pun intended) for a global treaty to be reached by an upcoming Paris summit in 2015.

Perhaps the most noteworthy speech of the summit was President Obama’s address, which was covered in an International New York Times article by Mark Landler. In Obama’s speech he name dropped the USA and China as the world’s biggest economies and well as polluters, as well as the two countries bearing the most responsibility to lead the global effort towards fighting climate change because “that’s what big nations have to do.” 

(Image by Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP)

If Beijing and Washington can’t come to some sort of an agreement then very few countries will likely agree to the treaty and again, nothing will happen. As Obama said, “we can only succeed in combating climate change if we are joined in this effort by every nation, developed and developing alike,” the president said. “Nobody gets a pass.” 

Climate change has far too often been made a political and an economical issue.

Still in America, Republicans tend denote that new rules prompting change nationwide as a “war on coal” and an energy tax. While obviously enacting change will affect the economy, not doing anything will raise the temperature of the global atmosphere so drastically that sea levels will rise, droughts will ensue, and food shortages, powerful storms and more will plague the worldwide population.

The time to make change is now. One of the most powerful moments of the summit was Leonardo Dicaprio’s speech seen here in an article by TIME.  He talked about his job, as an actor, which is simply put- to pretend. To quote Dicaprio’s speech: “mankind has looked at climate change in the same way, as if pretending climate change wasn’t real, it would go away. But I think we know now that isn’t the case.” 

The inclusion of Dicaprio as a speaker was a wise one. To be honest, I hadn’t heard anything about the UN Climate summit until somebody shared a link to Dicaprio’s speech on my Facebook timeline. Social media is a powerful tool for sharing and spreading ideas, but it is also a carefully calculated one. Most people may not care about, or be familiar with the issues concerning climate change, but almost everybody knows who Leonardo Dicaprio is. His rhetoric matters more to the general public, as he is a face we’re used to being entertained by, therefore we, as a mass are far more likely to listen to what he has to say.

Climate Change has in fact finally ditched its negatively perceived, Al Gore hyped mainstream name of “global warming,” and has moved onto a new name and a new driving force of action- The Internet. (Which Al Gore arguably also created) As I said before, my initial interest in climate change was struck by a Leonardo Dicaprio speech and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Organizations like Greenpeace and The Campaign Against Climate Change have incredibly accessible websites, which allows for climate change awareness to be spread more easily and rapidly. But you don’t have to be an organization to get the Internet’s attention.

Even the millennial generation can do something about Climate Change, and some have. Wired.com posted an article in February about a group of Columbia University students involved in a project called POLAR partnership. But what really has drawn attention to these students is a video project they’ve created called “FutureCoast,” a fictional narrative they’ve created which involves voicemails being sent back and forth from the future. The project has gained a lot of hype, which continues to contribute to the global awareness of climate change.

Image: NASA

I am hopeful that we have finally reached the point in human history where we, as a global community, will really do something about climate change. Only time will tell, and evidently, we don’t seem to have a lot of it left.





Link to Analytic Reflection 

Response to Donald DeBoise 


In their blog post "Blogging as a Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog," Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd attempt first to define what exactly is a "weblog" and attempt to saturate this definition with new critique and insight primarily pertaining to the genre itself of blogging. A mentioned by Donald, this blog was written in 2004, although only ten years ago, it was a time when LiveJournal was the driving force in the blogging community and the act of blogging itself was new, exciting and densely definable. According to Miller and Shepherd, the blog is unique as a genre in that it acts as "the peculiar intersection of the public and private that weblogs seem to invite." With blogging, one feels a sense of intimacy with his or her writing, which is ironic due to the world wide accessibility that one's blog affords itself. Blogging exists as a unique combination between privacy and public access.

In his response Donald asks "what role did the blog play in the development of social medias we have today?" I believe that blogging was an instrumental force in the evolution of social media today. As I mentioned before, Live Journal was the first real force in internet blogging, but the site itself today has become obsolete. Blogging itself has developed into less of its original purpose as an internet diary of sorts and has been combined with social media itself. The most popular blogging platform today is likely Tumblr, which allows users to "follow," "like," and "reblog," other users posts much like that of Twitter or Facebook. So blogging, in turn has become a social network in itself. The community aspect of websites like Tumblr and Twitter allow for users to feel a sense of unitarianism with other users. When I first made a Tumblr account in 2010 it appealed to me because I wanted to be heard, but not necessarily by people I knew in real life. I felt included in an interesting camaraderie within the otherwise strangers with whom i interacted with on Tumblr. In this sense, I believe that Miller and Shepherd's genre analysis of blogs definitely applies to social media, in the case that we are counting platforms such as Tumblr as social media.

Science is inarguably necessary to communicate to the general public, but how to go about doing so is subject to controversy amongst the scientific community. In "Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts," Jeanne Fahnestock addresses this complication through an intricate look into "the shift that occurs between the original presentation of a scientist's work and its popularization." (Fahnestock, 277) This same concept is discussed more specifically in M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer's piece "Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America."

Each piece focuses largely on the adaptation of complex scientific information to more accessible forms. The intention of accommodating science, as Fahnestock puts it, is to attempt to "bring the enormous gap between the public's right to know and the public's ability to undersatnd." The "public" as she puts it,  is comprised of the non scientific majority of people. Publications like National Geographic, and TIME magazine began to include more coverage of scientific subjects around the time both of the articles were published. (Note: both were published in the late 80's.)

These publications differ in many ways to their more scientifically sound predecessors. These articles, are more often than not a mix between news and human interest, the latter taking priority in what makes it to print. For example, as Fahnestock says that in scientific papers "significance is largely understood." This is not the case however, when the science switches genres as its rhetorical situation is changed in order to accommodate a larger audience. In this switch scientific posts become largely epidectic, that is their main purpose is to celebrate a new scientific finding rather than validate facts. As "Ecospeak" understands, this "ultimately ensures that the facts of science will be distorted or reinvented altogether when they are presented in the [news] media." (Killingsworth, Palmer 134) There is less trust in one's audience in this situation, therefore the author adjusts that information to be more conclusive and glamorized, and far more groundbreaking. Type 4 or 5 words that imply definite conclusions and unprecedented research such as "only" and "the first" are added to significantly dumbed down descriptions of scientific order in the hopes that the dramatic depiction of data and new findings will attract a more vast audience. Such terms would never be utilized by the scientist, as he or she would then risk invalidation by jumping to conclusions about his or her findings. However, "becuase he [or she] fears so such challenge, the accomodator is far more certain." To address the public on a scientific issue it must be able to gain the traction of human interest. People are not interested in a "possible scientific finding," they want significance. They want groundbreaking scientific studies which will either directly affect or improve their lives. This understanding creates an entire genre of scientific accomodation journalism, but has a nasty tendency to discredit the scientists themselves, or as Fahnestock puts it, "Accommodators will leap to results, whereas the original authors stay on the safe side of the chasm."

An important concept in the study of accommodating scientific texts is the stasis theory, which defines and orders the kinds of questions that can be asked. The questions are "What exactly happened and who did it?", What was the nature of definition of the act?", "What is the quality of the act?", and "Who has jurisdiction in this case and what action is called for?" Scientific reports "engage an issue in the first conjectural stasis: 'does a thing exist? Did an event really occur?" In contrast, accomodations typically move on prematurely to the latter stases, which speeds up a scientific explanation and in turn may go as far as to invalidate it as a whole. But as Fahnstock says, this is "an inevitable consequence of changing the audience for a piece of information and thus the purpose of relating it and thus the genre of the discourse that conveys it." A wider audience is created, but scientific accuracy is put at risk.

Is this ethically sound though? Fahnestock claims that "the science accommodator is not telling an untruth; he [or she] simply selects only the information that serves his [or her] epideictic purpose," but the perspective presented in "Ecospeak" seems to be far less accepting of this, noting that glamming up scientific research implies that "science must solve human problems and thus must transcend its own version of objectivism.... worthy of being reported in the press." The media more often than not focuses on the drama of science in the case that it is reporting about it at all. "Ecospeak" delves into an elaborate discussion of Global Warming and the media's reaction to it. It is an understood fact in journalism that people are drawn to crisis, "the topic of environmental degradation has become a certified issue, largely because it is perceived as having crisis potential."

Is the accommodation of scientific texts for broader audiences in this way ethically sound? Is it an underestimation of the ability of people to read and understand science, or rather a sad truth?

Is it worth risking the validity of scientific texts in order to allow it to pertain to a mass audience? Or should scientific journalism seise to exist in the shadow of real data and reporting?

Both of these texts were written in the late 1980s. How has the accessibility of scientific information changed since then, primarily considering the widespread access to the internet?

Jonah Lehrer and David Disalvo Blog Comparison

Decision making is an individualized and complex process. Each person makes decisions based on different factors, but the reasoning behind these choices tends to come from a more centralized place. In his blog post "Does Thinking About God Improve our Self Control," Jonah Lehrer delves into the religious aspects that may affect decision making, whether one is conscious of this sensation or not. In a related blog piece David Disalvo looks into "How Feeling Grateful Improves Your Decision Making," which is more or less ultimately related to religion at its core.

The Lehrer piece begins with a personal anecdote, likely purposed towards relating to the reader on a more intimate level. The author's exigence in doing this is purposed towards initially hooking his readers into his otherwise scientific argument. He then includes an intertextual reference to research recently published by Kevin Rounding in Psychological Science. In his study, Rounding discovered "people are better able to resist their desires when thinking about God." This conclusion was found by giving human subjects a choice between being paid less money right away, or waiting to receive more. Those mindful of God were far more likely to pick the latter option, more able to delay gratification. This is not unlike the believe of God, heaven, etc, in which believers restrain from participating in condemnable behavior due to faith in a higher power.

A similar study to the one in the Lehrer piece was referenced in David Disalvo's "How Feeling Grateful Improves Your Decision Making." Although God was never directly mentioned as a factor, the concept of gratitude was the main idea expressed throughout the piece. Disalvo references a very similar study to the one mentioned in the Lehrer piece, which he completed himself. In this specific study the researcher asked participants to write about a situation that either made them feel happy, gratification, or no particular emotion. Participants were then given the option between recieving $54 now or $80 in three days. The subjects preconditioned to feel happiness or no particular emotion opted for the instant cash gratification, while those feeling grateful were far more likely to wait three days for a bigger reward. This is not unlike Kevin Rounding's study, in which the belief of God caused subjects to control themselves from seeking instant gratification. Gratitude itself, is after all a strongly held belief in most religions, therefore those gratuitous participants would more than likely be religious individuals.

 But religion is obviously not required for one to feel gratitude, just as the belief in God is not necessarily required in order for one to include God in his or her decision making process. It is more then, the idea of God that affects the majority of decision making.  Both the Lehrer and Disalvo blog posts are purposed towards delving into the factors that affect our self control in relation to decision making. Each author approaches the topic in a unique, yet undeniably similar way, through intertextualizing an almost identical study.