Neighbourhood interest in the USA

Dr Alex C. Ruane, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies – Author for Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis and contributor to Special Report: Climate Change and Land, 2019, @AlexRuane, @NASAGISS 

“There is tremendous public interest in climate change, and many community groups confront the climate challenge by seeking out expert information and opportunities to make a difference that can responsibly safeguard the people, society, and natural systems they love. 

One example is when I was invited to speak at the St. Francis Xavier High School following Sunday Mass in Manhattan, New York, drawing in parishioners as well as members of the high school and neighborhood communities for a discussion on climate change challenges and opportunities.  The presentation was designed to engage the audience across diverse levels of scientific experience and cultural backgrounds but with a shared concern over the ways in which our actions are having unintended consequences on key elements of society and nature.  

After a brief discussion on the basics of climate science including the difficulty of relating daily weather to long-term climate changes, the presentation focused on how the changing climate system was affecting food, ecosystems, oceans, cities, and vulnerable communities.  Direct discussion of impacts and vulnerability make climate change real, translating from hard-to-relate quantities like parts-per-million CO2 concentrations and degrees Celsius to items on your dinner plate, the coastlines we enjoy and the cities where many of us live.

I also connected climate change issues to more relatable analogies such as sea level rise effects on floods being like raising the floor of a basketball court (resulting in more dunks when the hoop is easier to reach) or uncertainties about how much more carbon we can emit before catastrophic impacts being like a patient asking a doctor how many more cigarettes they can smoke without catching lung cancer (we can’t be sure, but it would be wise to cut back now).  

World Bank Agricultural meets with Goddard Scientists – Dr. Alex Ruane

The presentation ended by noting that time is a factor, which means our inaction has consequences, but also with a more positive tone: ‘We can reduce climate change and prepare for its consequences’, underscoring that scientists have reason to believe that we can anticipate many future challenges, giving us an opportunity to prevent them from occurring even as we also prepare to deal with impacts that we cannot avoid.”