"How can I help?"

-


And that is one of my wishes too.

"How can I help?"

If you have some inkling that climate change is (a) real, (b) bad, and (c) solvable
and you want to help but are not entirely sure what the right way to go about is, here are my suggestions:

▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂


Step 1: Get Informed


Information (especially the right information) does not regularly come our way by its own self. It has to be sought. If you want to help, here is my suggestion for getting started.

Step 1: Commit to learning about the climate crisis on a regular basis.


There are many ways to do this. For starters, you can follow updates by

(i)   Institutions that are work on this crisis
(ii)  Media houses that cover the crisis
(iii) Journalists who cover the crisis
(iv) Experts working in this domain

(i) Institutions

I suggest beginning with the monthly newsletter by NASA (subscribe here). The monthly frequency of the newsletter should avoid overwhelming you at the very start. NASA has a very interesting and interactive page on climate change, and is a reliable source of information. There is enough to be learnt browsing those pages for several months (I assume you don't do this full-time). This is a science-focused newsletter.

Carbon Brief and Climate Action Tracker also offer weekly/daily newsletters, but these require prior understanding and can be overwhelming in the beginning. If you have spent a few months with the NASA newsletters, you should give these newsletters a try.

For an India-centric newsletter, I suggest the ones by Carbon Copy.

The most comprehensive source of information are the IPCC Reports. The IPCC is a UN body, named the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change. It compiles information from experts across various domains -- and hence covers not just the scientific, but also the social and economic aspects about the climate crisis. The IPCC reports are quite advanced but the summaries (SPMs / Executive Summaries) are essential reading for anyone working in this field.


(ii) Media houses

Based on my casually chronicled experience, here are my suggestions:
Assessing media houses on their commitment to covering the climate crisis is difficult. It is simpler for each reader to assess if their preferred media-house is doing an okay job covering the issue. A simple litmus test is to visit their website, search for the keyword "climate change" and see the results. Do the results talk about scientific facts at all? Do they provide you informed opinions by experts? Do they only focus on propaganda?

You will notice that some Indian media houses cover the issue without any discussion of the facts, but only in conspiratorial or political tones. If your preferred newspaper or news channel never speaks about the climate crisis in a factual way, chances are, you're severely under-informed. You deserve better. If a media house is not talking constructively about climate change in 2024 (at least 80 years after its discovery and 30 years after it became a recognised global problem), they're either seriously bad at their jobs, or they're being paid by the fossil-fuel and the industrial lobbies to help delay climate action. My suggestion is to discard their services, just like you'd do with any other bad product / service.


(iii) Journalists

Once again, based on my casual observations, I have found the following journalists to be doing good work in covering the climate crisis:
  1. Bibek Bhattacharya - @sarvatathagata
  2. Aruna Chandrasekhar - @aruna_sekhar
  3. Jayashree Nandi - @jayashreenandi
  4. Jocelyn Timperley - @jloistf
  5. Nidhi Jamwal - @JamwalNidhi
  6. Bhasker Tripathi - @BhaskerTripathi
  7. Steven Mufson - @StevenMufson
  8. Ajit Niranjan - @NiranjanAjit
Even if you're not on Twitter, it is easy to look out for their articles with a simple Google search. If you're going to spend any of your time reading about the climate crisis, devote it to better articles.


(iv) Experts

Social media now gives you the option of directly finding out what the experts think about the issue. This can be overwhelming at first because it takes a while to 'catch up' with their tweets. But I find this a very effective way of getting insights straight from the horses' mouths. Some suggestions:

▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂

 By giving a multitude of options, it is my hope that most readers would find at least one which suits their level of understanding and their preference in style of writing.

For email subscriptions, go here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Darwin's Lost World - Part II

-
<< Previous page So what do we (did Darwin) know by now (then) ? That living creatures from the very very ancient past (we're talking in terms of millions of years) were often found preserved in the rock record. That we could make out some things about the past environments from these fossils. Fossils showed specific associations: you saw only certain types and groups of fossils in certain suites of rocks (belonging to different periods of geological time). There came a dead end at the base of the Cambrian. Scientists like to call this the Cambrian Explosion today, but back then, many of them were more inclined to dismiss this either as a figment of the imagination of relatively smaller body of researchers, or simply, incomplete/inaccurate science. That the Creator had made us all, was the popular view. 3 theories emerged to explain why we see the Cambrian Explosion (if it even is a real thing!): Charles Lyell Interestingly, it is said that Lyell was
Read more

On Darwin's Lost World

-
Image
Martin Brasier was a prolific paleontologist. And from what little I know of him, he must have been a pretty cool guy. I recently read his book "Darwin's Lost World" and it was definitely one of the better decisions of my life. On Darwin Thankfully, even the most plebeian of science curricula finds it worthwhile to describe Charles Darwin's scientific accomplishments. To me, all through childhood, Darwin represented my superiority to the apes. When someone said Darwin, I would get a mental picture of an ape gradually turning human. That's an overly simplistic picture, but then again, there is so much to learn about everything  that one doesn't quite know where to start. Source The rock record is the only thing that can give us a picture of the ancient Earth. Most other branches of science can tell you what the Earth is like, and why it is the way it is. But it was Geology that first told us what the Earth was  like, and bits of why it w
Read more

What is ENSO? Page 2 - SSTs and trade winds

-
Image
  This is Page 2 of the sub-series "What is ENSO?". If you haven't already, please read Page 1 first. For convenience, keep that page open in a different tab. = = = What is ENSO? In the previous post , we learnt to identify ENSO phases from the perspective of sea surface temperature anomalies . In this post, I'm going to answer a question that no one really asked ―  What if I wanted to identify ENSO phases from the perspective of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) instead? What if, for no good reason but because I felt like it, I wanted to do away with the "anomalies" bit? Looking at SSTs instead of SST anomalies makes matters unnecessarily complicated, but we're going to do it anyway because it also teaches us a lot. In the image below, I've plotted SSTs from the HadISST dataset. These are mean SSTs for the months of December, January and February (DJF) over all years from 1872-2009. Why did we select the months of DJF? Because ENSO events can be seen
Read more