Tag Archives: global warming

Amusing Monday: Expert explains climate science with a touch of humor

Climatologist Adam Levy, better known as ClimateAdam, uses humor and examples from everyday life to explain the science of climate change and to dispel mistaken beliefs and misinformation.

Take, for example, the first video on this page, which addresses a common statement I’ve heard from climate-change skeptics: If carbon dioxide is essential to life on the planet, how can it be considered dangerous?

I love Adam’s example, which shows an alternative Adam getting drenched in a shower with his clothes on. Yes, water is essential to the planet, but it’s not always beneficial, as I discuss constantly in this blog.

“The greenhouse effect from carbon dioxide is actually a good thing,” Adam acknowledges. “We should all be super-grateful for it. Without it, there would be no protective warming blanket around the Earth, and things would get way too cold for comfort.”

But he points out that too much CO2 can mean too much of a good thing — that is, too much warmth. In another video, titled “Why the Greenhouse Effect is like a Hot Sweater,” Adam says when a person gets too warm, he needs to take off a sweater — or at least stop putting on more clothing.

Adam holds a doctorate degree in atmospheric physics from the University of Oxford, where he began his YouTube channel. He later worked for Nature publications, where he co-hosted the award-winning Nature Podcast. He currently works as a freelancer, producing scientific podcasts and videos for a variety of organizations while continuing his podcast.

The second video is a new trailer for his YouTube channel, showing clips from the videos he produced over the past five years.

“While I was doing my doctorate, I was constantly having conversations about climate change,” he told Mikaela Joyce in an interview for MIT’s “Climate” publication. “I realized just how different those conversations were when I had them with my colleagues versus when they were with friends, family and strangers. But I loved these discussions, because it felt like I was able to share the knowledge I was accumulating and help other people see through some of the disinformation they had come across. So I thought, why not start talking to even more strangers?

“I was aiming to make a YouTube channel that was first and foremost entertaining and engaging,” he added. “I wanted my videos to be funny enough that you’d want to watch to the end even if you didn’t care about climate change. The hope was that if I could do this, I could trick people into learning. And maybe even trick them into caring.”

Earlier this year, Adam won second place in the Comedy & Climate Change Video Competition sponsored by Inside the Greenhouse.

While most of his videos are based on humorous situations, Adam took on a serious tone a year ago when he became frustrated with the international climate-change negotiations known as Conference of the Parties to the United Nations, or COPP 24. His video “Climate negotiations made me terrified for our future” is the third on this page, but I only feature that video as a lead-in to the latest video that Adam produced last week during COPP 25.

In the fourth video, Adam expresses a heartfelt appreciation for Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish activist who has become famous for her emotional and even taunting speeches directed to political leaders and international assemblies. Greta was named last week as Time magazine’s Person of the Year. If you want to know why some people find her so inspirational, I would urge you to watch Adam’s entire video on this page.

In a similar fashion, Adam posted a video last month that reflects the frustration that must be felt by every climate scientist in the world when they consider the climate views of our current U.S. president, Donald Trump. I must say that I did smile at times while listening to ClimateAdam’s responses to Trump’s outlandish viewpoints. See “Climate Scientist reacts to Donald Trump’s climate comments.”

Here is my list of ClimateAdam’s Best Videos:

For all of Adam’s videos, check out his YouTube channel, ClimateAdam.

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Amusing Monday: Movement of music captures climate discord

Using music to describe measurable changes in climate — and expressing the anxiety caused by the ongoing changes — is one approach to the climate problem that has been engaging scientists and musicians alike.

I’ve been following several methods of converting data to sound, which approximates music in some ways (Water Ways, Jan 16, 2017). But the Climate Music Project in San Francisco starts with a nearly complete musical composition and allows the data to alter the sound in remarkable ways.

Composer Erik Ian Walker had been writing and recording music for 30 years when he joined the Climate Music Project in 2015, collaborating with scientists and technicians to explore musical approaches to climate change.

“I welcomed the invitation to write and perform ‘Climate’ for CMP because I feel very strongly about the necessity to communicate the urgency of stopping the negative effects of human-caused climate change,” Erik said in an interview on CMP’s website. “Being a composer, this was the best use of my talents to do something. I also like the intersection of science and music very much, so it was a good fit….

“Decisions that had to be made were whether the climate data was going to be the music (sonification), or whether the data was going to alter music composed before the data collided with it,” he continued. “We chose the latter, as that was the more interesting scenario for a dramatic rendering…

“The hardest part was composing a ‘theme’ and framework that would not devolve too fast as the data we were using began to change the music,” he said. “There is a subjective response of the ear, outside of prescribed numbers, that gauges where ‘double’ of something is, for example. So, we had to find an ‘end point’ of the piece, where the greatest degree of climate change would be, hear what that would sound like, and work backward from there.”

The result is shown in the first video on this page, which shows the piece accompanied with dynamic charts and graphs. In fact, if you happen to be in San Francisco on Sept. 19, you can see and hear a CMP performance of “Climate” at the Exploratorium in the Embarcadero waterfront district.

The piece is about 30 minutes long and offers two scenarios: one in which humans continue on the current path of pumping massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and another in which major changes are made to keep the rise to less than 3.6 degrees F. — the goal of the Paris Climate Accord.

Reporter John Metcalfe describes in CityLab how the melodic movement begins to shift as the calendar reaches the start of the industrial revolution.

“Weird distortions like twinges in a stretched-out cassette tape arrive in the late 1900s as Earth’s energy balance is jolted out of whack,” he writes. “Looking into the future, the music then turns darker and frenetic in the decades post-2017 — the beat and pitch racing, the melody discordant and churning, and the planet’s temperature soaring into an irreversible heat hell.”

Besides the first video, enjoy the following samples of music from two different time periods offered by CMP on Vimeo:

Stephan Crawford, who started the Climate Music Project, explains how he came up with the concept of creating music that can help people experience climate change in an emotional way in an article by Alessandra Potenza in The Verge magazine. The second video on this page provides an idea of how the collaboration works for those involved with the project.

The difference between Erik Ian Walker’s “Climate” and sonifications of data — which certainly have their place — is that you can become immersed in the music, enjoying even the dark parts for their emotional impact. To sample and purchase Erik’s “normal” music go to Bottom Feeder Records’ webpage.

The third video is a promo of the Climate Music Project from two years ago.

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What do people truly believe when it comes to climate change?

Nationwide polls show that more and more people believe that humans are responsible for increasing greenhouse gases and thus altering our climate — including unusual changes in weather patterns, rising sea levels and disruptions in the oceanic food web.

I keep waiting for public opinion to reach a critical mass, so that government officials feel compelled to take serious actions to get climate change under control.

Instead, we see President Trump ordering rollbacks on regulations designed to reduce emissions from coal-fired plants and automobiles. The result will be a greater rate of climate change.

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Climate Sense: Sharing a little optimism about climate change

One of the most optimistic stories I’ve read — and listened to — about climate change comes from Dan Charles, National Public Radio’s food and agriculture reporter. In a three part-series, Dan takes us on a trip to the year 2050, imagining a time when the world has solved the climate change problem.

Also in my readings this week, I’ve stumbled on some stories about scare tactics in Congress and how to turn back the clock on climate emissions.

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Climate Sense: So much is still about politics

Climate change is finally being discussed in Congress and by the Trump administration, but not necessarily in a good way. This week I share some of the things I’ve been reading with regard to the politics of climate change. If there’s a silver lining, it could be that climate change is getting some attention among politicians. I’m holding some interesting scientific studies for another week.

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Climate Sense: The road to clean energy – politics, technology and culture

Experts say it is possible, in the not-too-distant future, for the United States to generate nearly all its electrical energy from sources that do not produce climate-changing greenhouse gases. But first some political and technical hurdles must be crossed.

In this week’s “Climate Sense,” I share some news articles that I found noteworthy, as well as an interesting description of five movies about climate change — including the one in the video player here. Films can help bring about cultural change, as mentioned in a review of five films about climate change (Item 6 at the bottom).

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Amusing Monday: Colbert has fun with Trump’s climate views

I’m not a regular viewer of Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show,” so I wasn’t aware of how much he talks about climate change in his monologues and intros until I began reviewing video clips of the show.

Colbert especially likes to joke about the Trump administration’s management of climate change — or should I say the administration’s apparent desire for the subject to just go away.

Last week, Colbert lambasted the appointment of William Happer to head a committee formed to determine whether climate change poses a threat to national security. Happer is a physicist who has no formal training in climate science, although he served as director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science under the George HW Bush administration.

Happer’s claim to fame has been his assertion that global warming is largely a natural phenomenon and that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is really a good thing.

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Climate Sense: Talking about climate change

The urgency of addressing climate change in meaningful ways — such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions — seems to be lost on many Americans. Many others, however, feel the urgency to do something, but they don’t know what to do.

Beyond reducing energy consumption in our personal lives, one of the most important things we can do is to talk about climate change, according to a variety of experts who have been sharing their strategies for action.

When I started this “Climate Sense” series, my goal was to share information I come across during my readings about climate change. At the same time, I’ve been trying to include this topic in my everyday conversations, sharing new findings and learning how others feel about the changing weather and more serious problems. This week, I’d like to share some ideas for getting more people into the conversation.

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Climate Sense: Congressional hearings and the Green New Deal

Congress is becoming active on climate change — at least with respect to hearings and proposed legislation. Progressive Democrats, including newly elected members of the House, are expressing hope that climate change will be taken off the back burner and brought to a simmering boil. I would also like to point you to some new findings about the impacts of climate change on the Himalayan region of Asia.

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Climate Sense: U.S. stuck in icebox while Australia comes out of the oven

Last week, I shared stories about a record heat wave that has been causing severe fires, drought and medical emergencies in Australia. This week, I was pleased to see climatologists and meteorologists in the U.S. take time to explain to average people how we can have bitter cold amid a phenomenon called climate change, which is raising the average temperature across the Earth.

By the way, January was the hottest month ever for Australia, according to an article by BBC News, telling just how bad it got. Temperatures have moderated the past few days.

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