One of the major issues people have when dealing with the realness of environmental impacts or climate change is lack of direct visual or tactile effects. It can be very hard to imagine how a few degrees of warmth might impact you, how deforestation relates to your local community, how pollution may endanger a species, or how ice melting in the poles is even relevant to communities in which we live. It can often be nearly impossible to provide our senses with supporting evidence of these impacts we read and hear about. So you want some real in your face visuals – take a vacation. « continue reading »
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Sometimes it can be very easy to determine what impact your organization has. With a quick look at your financial records last year, you can fairly easily come up with how much you contributed to the *Gross Domestic Product (GDP)*, or you might be able to say a certain quantity of people were supported through your charitable activities. You can probably even quickly determine what your power or water usage levels were. However, measuring your impact on the climate or environment can quite often be a bit less straight forward and difficult to quantify. So is it really feasible to try and do in the first place?
Now, you don’t really need me to answer that question, do you? And while everyone may have different thresholds for the level of importance regarding climate/environmental issues, we are living in an age where the results of human behavior are becoming both more understood and quantifiable. You could in theory go on and do nothing for a while, but the likelihood is that at some point even if you do nothing now the regulatory end of society will catch up with things and force the changes. So whatever your reasoning, getting a grasp of how your company, government, association, family or even just you contributes to the environmental changes occurring around you is a logical choice.
Of course painting the complete picture will be an involved task, so the let’s focus today on how to get started. These steps will help you get underway, and when repeated can move you towards a more thorough understanding.
Pick a single item – don’t try to do this all in the once. Now if your organization is big enough to either give someone full responsibility or even hire help in this process that is great, but reality for most will be this will be an ancillary item / part-time task to begin with. So start by thinking about a single question like – ‘how much waste water do we produce?’
Start small – even once you pick a question you want to answer it might be best to either answer it only for a portion of your organization or for certain activities to get your hands the process of effective measurement. For instance understanding the power usage for lighting only or in an average office, is something you can measure and then extrapolate without having to directly measure across an entire location or facilities in different parts of the world.
Measurable directly – do not try to pick something that you can not easily measure yourself. While there are tools and calculators for measuring things like your *Carbon Footprint*, measuring something like this actually can be less explicit and usually less meaningful for your organization. You are better off understanding what you do that does contribute and measuring that directly. Like knowing that all your power comes from a coal power plant and therefore measuring your power usage is much easier for you and is something that is also more familiar and useful.
Think multi-beneficial items – even if you could measure the level of nitrates you are putting into the water supply through fertilizers in your green spaces, it is likely best to start with areas where you can also benefit your organization in other ways. For instance understanding the power consumption through the use of incandescent light bulbs can help you in the process of understanding your carbon dioxide outputs, but also with how you can save on your power bill. Of course the bigger the potential the results the more organizational buy in their is likely to be.
Input from others – do not hesitate to look to other organizations that are tied to yours for help or information. They may have either have tools or people that can help you in the process, or they may have undertaken similar tasks as well and have valuable recommendations of do’s and dont’s.
Understand and act – the absolute worse thing you can do in all this is just to go into it without really thinking about how it fits into both your short-term and long-term plans. It is also wise to spend some time in understanding how your direct actions influence climate and the environment. And maybe the most important aspect in answering your question(s) of choice is acting upon the answers to make change within your organization.
Hopefully once you try these steps for one item, you can use them again and again for additional items. Then when there is a comfort level you can proceed to a more in depth process and plan. I realize you might also need some help just getting out of the starting block, so here are a couple of websites that can help in sparking some of those initial questions for you -
If you really want to dig into this topic with some additional reading, I recommend *”Hot, Flat and Crowded”* by Thomas L. Friedman. The book provides a good large scale overview of the challenges and opportunities in this ‘greening’ world (I will caution that while the book is informative, the lack of siting sources in some cases means read it for thought provoking not firm answers).
Next time we will look at a very visual example of how we humans do indeed impact the environment through direct and indirect actions. Given the difficulties in really understanding our contributions as we have discussed today, sometimes only the blatantly obvious can really jog our systems. Until then, learn and act in a responsible and meaningful way!
As I undertake final preparation on a presentation related to seasonal forecasting for next week’s American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting, it seemed like a good time to look back at last year’s seasonal forecast for the North Atlantic Hurricane Season. In previous posts (1st, second), we looked at what various forecasting groups were saying the 2009 hurricane season would look like. We have now put a month between us and the official end of the Atlantic Hurricane Season, so it is time to determine how well these forecasts panned out. « continue reading »
Certainly I am a firm believer in acting, as I feel it is worse to sit idly by and let things happen without caring, but I also feel it is important to act with the a proper level of understanding as to what outcomes may occur. Hopefully during the course of this year WhyShouldICare has allowed you to do exactly that. Going forward that will continue to be the underlying basis of what we attempt to do. The past year has been a learning experience in the blogging world – getting my feet wet, remembering the challenges of writing meaningfully, finding time to do one more thing…the list could go on forever. It has been rewarding just to do it, but more so in hearing from some readers that have found posts on the site to be truly useful (as that was the primary goal). Y’all have also provided some excellent feedback in both comments to posts and in direct correspondences, thank you for taking the time to provide it. As we step in to 2010, every effort will be made to continue with posts that allow you to think and make up your own mind but doing it with fact-based knowledge. A few basic changes in plan for the year include:
As you enter 2010 I encourage you to take the time to make a set of goals, for how can you achieve anything if you have no idea what your objective is. If you are not use to doing it, just set a few to start and make them for different aspects of your life – career, family, friends, personal, whatever. There is no reward like reaching a goal. I also suggest you encourage others and be supportive of their efforts to achieve! To that end, here are a few new year hopes I have for everyone:
Now let’s all go and take on 2010!
In times when the global economy has been suffering, it is not surprising to hear links between potential negative economic impact and adjusting human behavior with respect to our planet. But this connection was made long before we entered the recent global recessionary period. It even made it to the big screen during a economic growth period in “The Day After Tomorrow”, in this little exchange of key characters: Vice President Becker: And who’s going to pay the price of the Kyoto accord? It would cost the world’s economy hundreds of billions of dollars. And while Hollywood may not always be accurate and may blow things out of proportion at times, this connection is not new and the general impression given is always one to the effect that the scale of responding to climate change or major environmental issues is so grand that the economic consequences are just to great. Let us accept for a moment that both realms seem intertwined and fragile. A fundamental question becomes – Can both the environment and economy benefit in a positive way from one another? « continue reading » No doubt that you have heard, seen, read reports on last week’s ‘big news’ in the climate community. By chance if you hadn’t, last week a climate research center in the UK had a hacking event take place that exposed a wide array of files including some not so flattering emails. Ordinarily we try to avoid current events that focus on speculation and opinion or that don’t provide enough information to cut through the media spin/take to give a grounded basis of information for you to build upon. However, as a professional in the climate field I have gotten lots of inquiries about this story and the most intriguing point for me is the factor of trust. So, can you, can you still trust climate scientists? « continue reading » Having witnessed firsthand the devastation of a river flood this past month, it seemed an appropriate time to look into an area of science that can sometimes be very confusing – probability of prediction and its fluid nature. In this case we will focus on what a 100 year flood translates into, but another common example you may be familiar with is the XX% chance of precipitation in a weather forecast. In chatting with folks after the flood event the two most common questions I heard were – ‘Does a 100 year flood only happen every 100 years?’ and ‘What does term 100 year flood really mean?’ What I found particularly interesting was almost everyone from which I heard these inquiries had some idea of what they thought it meant but also had a meaningful level of doubt that their interpretation was correct. So, what does it mean? « continue reading » Over the weekend I saw a line in a news feed that relayed some of the following key phrases – ‘NASA scientist’ … ‘El Nino’ … ‘Minimal Impact’. Of course at the time I was in the midst of something and did not have time to pull up the article and read the details. However, over the next couple of days the more I thought about it, the harder it was for me to believe that a NASA scientist would make such a bold statement. I started to wonder if this might not be a good case of the news cycle we laughed a bit about back in August, simply a bit of glorifying some key aspect of a news release to a point where it no longer was recognizable. « continue reading » Again and again I have reiterated the importance of taking some self responsibility in making sure you are getting to a base truth about stories you are exposed to via your favorite media outlets. At the same time I know following that advice is not always simple as it sounds given that quite often the sourced research is published in journals that you just don’t happen upon in your local bookstore or newsstand. However, there are a variety of routes you can take in getting access to these publications and the process may not be as hard as you think. But before we walk down the path of how, let’s stop for a moment and consider the why. Isn’t the why always more interesting anyway? « continue reading » |
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Sometimes it can be very easy to determine what impact your organization has. With a quick look at your financial records last year, you can fairly easily come up with how much you contributed to the 
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