As 2022 dawns, I look back on 2021 with gratitude & amazement. We came so far – I did and Climate Companion did. I’m guessing you did as well, and I’m grateful to be in the climate fight with you. You played a role in moving me and Climate Companion forward, and I thank you. In this blog post, I outline what we learned and accomplished in 2021 and provide a glimpse of our goals for 2022.
Category: Drawdown
The 50th Anniversary of the first Earth Day is this week, on April 22. The idea of the original Earth Day was that human health and planetary health are tightly linked: to protect one, we must protect the other. What might our planet be like 50 years from now, on the 100th Anniversary? In this post, I’m putting out my vision of that 2070 future, and some steps we can take now to get there, even in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis.
As long-time readers of this blog know, the Drawdown project and book were my inspiration for starting this blog. The blog’s original name even included the word Drawdown (+ Data Science). Even while running my new company, I keep an eye on Drawdown. I heard their Executive Director Jonathan Foley speak some months back, so I knew that a new version of Drawdown was coming. In this post, I aim to spread the word on the new version and summarize the changes.
Bringing…people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve the problems we face, before it’s too late. Our goal must be to find a new way of unleashing our collective intelligence…
Al Gore, The Assault on Reason: Our Information Ecosystem, from the Age of Print to the Era of Trump. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017
My awareness of the dangers of climate change and my intention to act started when I saw An Inconvenient Truth, Thus, quoting Al Gore seems perfect today, as I announce the next chapter in my journey to reverse global warming. I’ve been talking for many years with friends and associates about what we can do about climate change. Then about 19 months ago, I quit my job to focus on contributing to climate change solutions, and started this blog in January.
Several months ago, my message about climate change started really hitting home with my friend and prior collaborator Darla Hewett. Darla is an amazing data engineer who has helped practitioners in multiple industries increase their effectiveness. Some of the technologies she uses resonated with and have been inspired by Doug Engelbart.
After some discussion, Darla and I decided to start a new initiative together, focusing on solutions to climate change. This post tells our origin story – read on the learn more.
I’ve been thinking about food waste a lot lately. Why? It started when I perused Drawdown’s list of top solutions to global warming. Reduced food waste is ranked third, and it’s the highest ranked solution that almost anyone can take action on. But before we can take action, we need to be informed. This post seeks to do so, empowering you to take part in the conversation that needs to happen to solve this gnarly problem!
As the effects of global warming increase in severity, many of us understandably want action. Multiple organizations focus on climate change communication and persuading people to act. But in many ways, this effort has hit a wall: the percentage of Americans who think that global warming is happening has held steady over the past two years, at around 70%. Furthermore, belief does not always incite action. How can we speed up progress in persuading people to act?
What if we take another communication approach? What if we communicate about a topic less likely to face the challenges faced by focusing on climate change? What if we do not even mention global warming or climate change? Why would we make this change in our communications strategy? Because if people act on it as a result, we also contribute to reversing global warming. The topic I’m referring to is simple living.
Until now I haven’t explained the name of my blog; today I will rectify that. Drawdown is a book, a project, and a website, dedicated to analyzing, ranking, and explaining the already existing or emerging solutions to reversing global warming. It’s an amazing project with some solutions that surprised me when I first read them. I’ll give a very brief overview of the project in this post. The website is comprehensive and I highly recommend the book.
The term “drawdown” might typically be used to describe reductions in financial accounts or military forces. The Drawdown team uses it instead “to refer to reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.” From reading their materials, it’s clear when they say carbon, they refer to greenhouse gases beyond CO2. Analyses such as these rely on scientists’ ability to calculate the global warming potential of different gases. Thus any gas can be translated into its equivalent in CO2; this is sometimes written as CO2e, or carbon dioxide equivalent.
Welcome to my blog!
The Drawdown Data Science blog is about reversing human created global warming, with a focus on data science and artificial intelligence techniques as significant pieces of the solution. I am motivated to communicate because of my goal to act to solve climate change. I intend to spur others to contribute to solving this global crisis. And yes, it is nothing short of a crisis. There is nothing to debate here, when 97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming.
Global warming and the associated climate change is happening already — in your state, town, district, or country. It’s not good for anyone — whether it’s hurricanes, drought, fires, extreme heat, extreme storms, flooding, or just a shift in the growing season near you…these things have all been influenced by the rising temperatures. But there are plenty of resources discussing these changes. I direct you to a few in the related resources section of this blog.