Climate Science and Climate Change Across the Curricula – Seizing Opportunities

Author(s):  
Margaret Holzer

<p>Challenges abound as our Earth warms, seas rise, and weather extremes become more and more common. Solutions to these challenges requires the collective knowledge of many along with transdisciplinary approaches, resulting in unique, creative, and comprehensive solutions.  In addition, these challenges come in many spatial and temporal sizes, and therefore solutions are needed at local, regional, global levels organized by small scale and larger scale groups. School systems can be a hub of ingenuity when it comes to designing and implementing solutions if guided by a clear pathway. Some states in the United States of America have adopted standards for learning that include climate science and climate change across all subject areas. In these states the vision for standards implementation parallels a vision for meeting the local and regional challenges of climate change. This presentation will outline the new roles afforded schools in our collective effort to reverse climate change and reduce its impact along the way.</p>

Science ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 356 (6345) ◽  
pp. 1362-1369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Solomon Hsiang ◽  
Robert Kopp ◽  
Amir Jina ◽  
James Rising ◽  
Michael Delgado ◽  
...  

Estimates of climate change damage are central to the design of climate policies. Here, we develop a flexible architecture for computing damages that integrates climate science, econometric analyses, and process models. We use this approach to construct spatially explicit, probabilistic, and empirically derived estimates of economic damage in the United States from climate change. The combined value of market and nonmarket damage across analyzed sectors—agriculture, crime, coastal storms, energy, human mortality, and labor—increases quadratically in global mean temperature, costing roughly 1.2% of gross domestic product per +1°C on average. Importantly, risk is distributed unequally across locations, generating a large transfer of value northward and westward that increases economic inequality. By the late 21st century, the poorest third of counties are projected to experience damages between 2 and 20% of county income (90% chance) under business-as-usual emissions (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5).


Eos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney Peterson ◽  
Leslie Brandt ◽  
Emile Elias ◽  
Sarah Hurteau

Cities across the United States are feeling the heat as they struggle to integrate climate science into on-the-ground decisionmaking regarding urban tree planting and management.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin M. F. Timm ◽  
Edward W. Maibach ◽  
Maxwell Boykoff ◽  
Teresa A. Myers ◽  
Melissa A. Broeckelman-Post

AbstractThe journalistic norm of balance has been described as the practice of giving equal weight to different sides of a story; false balance is balanced reporting when the weight of evidence strongly favors one side over others—for example, the reality of human-caused climate change. False balance is problematic because it skews public perception of expert agreement. Through formative interviews and a survey of American weathercasters about climate change reporting, we found that objectivity and balance—topics that have frequently been studied with environmental journalists—are also relevant to understanding climate change reporting among weathercasters. Questions about the practice of and reasons for presenting an opposing viewpoint when reporting on climate change were included in a 2017 census survey of weathercasters working in the United States (N = 480; response rate = 22%). When reporting on climate change, 35% of weathercasters present an opposing viewpoint “always” or “most of the time.” Their rationale for reporting opposing viewpoints included the journalistic norms of objectivity and balanced reporting (53%), their perceived uncertainty of climate science (21%), to acknowledge differences of opinion (17%), to maintain credibility (14%), and to strengthen the story (7%). These findings show that climate change reporting from weathercasters sometimes includes opposing viewpoints, and possibly a false balance, but further research is necessary. Moreover, prior research has shown that the climate reporting practices among weathercasters are evolving rapidly and so the problem of false-balance reporting may already be self-correcting.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Spitzer ◽  
Bernhard Burtscher

AbstractThe authors examine the intricate questions of liability for climate change-related damage. They take a comparative approach and after informing about the developments in the mother country of climate change litigation – the United States of America – turn to an in-depth analysis of liability for tort.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Yolandi Meyer ◽  
Willem H. Gravet

Summary This article analyses the protracted climate change case of Juliana v United States of America. We consider the history of the case as well as the most recent judgment of the Federal Court of Appeals, which seems to be the final judgment in this case as it is not foreseen that the case will be appealed with any success. The Juliana case provided hope for many people in the United States that the case would be able to succeed and possibly alter climate change policy in the country. Although the latest judgment will be disappointing to climate change activists and those affected by climate change, we agree with the ruling of the majority opinion in the Court of Appeals case and believe that it is a sound legal decision despite its general disapprobation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomaž Gerden

The measures at the level of the United Nations have been implemented in light of the scientific research on the increasing emissions of gases, predominantly created during fossil fuels combustion, which cause the warming of the atmosphere and result in harmful climate change effects. The adoption of this measures has also been demanded by non-governmental environmental organisations. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted by the leaders of the intergovernmental organisation members at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in June 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. After the ratification process, it came into force in March 1994. It also provided for the drawing-up of an appendix: a Protocol on the obligatory reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The Parties to the Framework Convention started the negotiations at their first annual conference COP1 in Berlin in March and April 1995. Due to their modest greenhouse gas emissions per capita and their right to development, the developing states demanded that the obligatory reductions of these emissions only be implemented by the industrially-developed countries. In the latter camp, the European Union favoured a tougher implementation; the United States of America argued for a less demanding agreement due to the pressure of the oil and coal lobbies; while the OPEC member countries were against all measures. After lengthy negotiations, the Protocol was adopted at the end of the COP3 Conference in Kyoto on 11 December 1997. It only involved a group of industrially developed countries, which undertook to reduce their emissions by 5.2 %, on average, until the year 2012 in comparison with the base-year of 1990. In the EU as well as in Slovenia, an 8 % reduction was implemented. As the United States of America withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, its ratification was delayed. It came into force on 16 February 2005, after it had been ratified by more than 55 UN member states, together responsible for more than 55 % of the total global greenhouse gas emissions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-368
Author(s):  
Rajat Verma ◽  
K. Gayithri

This article attempts to document the status of environmental fiscal instruments (EFIs) so as to explore relevant international experiences on ecotaxes in the context of India and to examine India’s specificities in these taxes within a wider perspective of other fiscal measures. Environmental levies across 15 countries were reviewed and the countries categorised are into two groups: Annex II and Non-Annex I. The revenues from levies imposed in the countries were also analysed. The most common form of taxes in Annex II countries in the form of energy taxes, followed by transport taxes. For India, energy and transport taxes could prove to be vital types of ecotaxes for addressing issues of climate change. Pollution taxes are difficult to levy for administrative reasons, but resource taxes are imperative because of severe environmental problems associated with mining and related activities. The revenue generated from environmental taxes and charges for all Annex II countries hovered between 2 and 4 per cent of their respective GDPs, except for Canada and the United States of America, whereas for Non-Annex I nations, this ranged only between 0 and 1 per cent. JEL Classification: H23, Q50, Q58


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (10) ◽  
pp. eaax8995 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine J. Mach ◽  
Caroline M. Kraan ◽  
Miyuki Hino ◽  
A. R. Siders ◽  
Erica M. Johnston ◽  
...  

Retreat from some areas will become unavoidable under intensifying climate change. Existing deployments of managed retreat are at small scale compared to potential future needs, leaving open questions about where, when, and how retreat under climate change will occur. Here, we analyze more than 40,000 voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties in the United States, in which homeowners sell properties to the government and the land is restored to open space. In contrast to model-based evaluation of potential future retreat, local governments in counties with higher population and income are more likely to administer buyouts. The bought-out properties themselves, however, are concentrated in areas of greater social vulnerability within these counties, pointing to the importance of assessing the equity of buyout implementation and outcomes. These patterns demonstrate the challenges associated with locally driven implementation of managed retreat and the potential benefits of experimentation with different approaches to retreat.


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