This march, just a week after the March for Science, was about 1/10th the size. We probably had 2,000 people as opposed to their 20,000. Spirits were high though, and the main march in Washington DC got 200,000.
Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has shown little or no concern for the health of the climate. The EPA's Climate Change page now reads "This page is being updated," because, y'know, climate is such a deeply controversial subject [/snark], that is, there's so much money involved in the subject. The NASA climate page is still up, but who knows how long that will last?
One of our speakers before the march, a Native American.
Unfortunately, the NY Times has picked now to feature a new op-ed writer, a climate change denialist, whose columns are now featured on their climate change page along with those of actual scientists. I took a look at his debut column and was less than impressed.
The
author starts off by suggesting that the Hillary Clinton campaign
somehow misread or didn’t fully grasp the poll numbers and so was
blindsided by the 2016 election results.
But that’s not true.
Clinton was maintaining a small, but steady lead over Trump. Trump was
trying very hard, but couldn’t bridge that gap. The real problem was
that FBI Director Comey came out of the blue with supposedly new emails
that he hadn’t yet examined himself. That threw a giant monkey wrench into the campaign and pushed Trump over the top.
From
there our author goes on to call into question the authority of climate
science and suggests that we should be much more cautious about claims
that sound too certain.
From May 5th through the 13th, 350.org is taking part in the Global Divestment Mobilization.
From
5-13 May, the Global Divestment Mobilisation will intensify the demand
for individuals and institutions to divest from the companies most
responsible for causing climate change. With regressive politics on the
rise, and the impacts of climate change already devastating the
livelihoods of communities around the world, divestment from fossil
fuels is expanding into new regions to further help enact the immediate
climate leadership the world urgently needs.
Thousands worldwide
will take action to push cities, universities, churches, pension funds,
museums and other institutions to demonstrate climate leadership by
breaking their financial ties to fossil fuel companies.
Whenever an argument starts up with a climate change skeptic, the conversation seems to turn quickly to climate change models and how those models are so very unreliable. Actually, if you watch Neil deGrasse Tyson's "The World Set Free" (Chapter 12 of Cosmos, a reboot/sequel to Carl Sagan's 1970s series), Tyson manages to explain the issue without any reference to models at all. But are models reliable? Actually, they are and they say that climate change is a real problem. Models began when scientists started trying to predict nuclear explosion results and went on to improving automobile engines. The idea is that you start off with actual climate data and then get to actual climate data a century or so later using mathematical models. If you can successfully get from one to the other, you can successfully predict the future.
The Blaze, a very conservative site, put out a piece that attemps to prove that Neil deGrasse Tyson is wrong. Problem is, they base their argument on numbers of believers vs. skeptics. They count up how many people in the American Meteorological Society believe that climate change is real and threatening. Only 29% do. But meteorology is weather predicting and not climate science. The fields are similar and deal with similar data sets, but it's like asking football players a technical question about baseball. Besides, the whole opinion survey approach, while it may be a good starting point, is flawed. Once, Albert Einstein was asked his view on a book "A Hundred Authors Against Einstein" (Which actually listed 120 critics) "Einstein retorted by saying 'Why 100 authors? If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!'”
Cool flag!
Is climate change forcing real-world, right-now adjustments? Actually, yes. According to the Center for Progressive Reform, 17 mostly indigenous communities are being forced, mostly by rising seas, to abandon their communities.
By 2100, a project 12-foot rise in sea level (This will only happen, of course, if no action on climate change is taken), could meanthat 710,000 people in New Jersey could be displaced. There are four states that would be more heavily impacted.
Speech near 30th St Station.
Former Mayor of NYC Michael Bloomberg and Carl Pope were recently interviewed on The Daily Show, saying yes, there is hope for stopping climate change. They say that cities should take the lead in the fight to switch over from fossil fuels to green, renewable energy.
