Category: Uncategorized

Would you believe me if I told you that once upon a time some of the cleanest water was found right here in this very city? 

Can you guess which borough, the Bronx! The Bronx river used to be an industrial neighborhood before it was torn down to build a water preserve in the late 1900’s. After reconstruction and digging up the oil. The city designed the river with the intent to have it used for a clean source of drinking water for New York city. This attempt had failed when the city failed to build a proper filtration system. Therefore the bronx river turned from being the cleanest water to the dirtiest water. There was tons of sewage backed up in the water that the conditions became unlivable. 

Today, the Bronx river alliance has made it their mission to foresee that the bronx river never experiences devastating living conditions again. In one way we see that today there is a trash boom located at the end of the river that connects with the ocean. This is to prevent trash from entering the ocean. Then the city comes once a month to dig up that trash. 

On February 26th, I took a dive into history at Starlight park. Where I got to watch the light come back into this very city since the 1900’s. One of the ways I got to observe that, was through watching the animals that once left, return to our city. At this winter bird watching nature event, I saw Mallard ducks swimming in the river. I also got to experience a couple of “lifers.” Lifers is when you see a new species of bird for the first time. I saw red cardinals with their bright red feathers. The female cardinals don’t sing but the male was making his mating call. I learned that birds that take the same parental role in their species tend to be difficult to differentiate between male and female. As the European starling flew over my head and I saw its iridescent feathers. The leader of the event told me that these birds were brought by a man, who wanted to bring these birds in the place of our great writer shakespeare. NYC Audubon and the Bronx River Aliance are doing things everyday to maintain the upkeep of the park. They have designed an area for native plants to benefit the environment by contributing to the food chain. They also are testing the water qualities of the river frequently to track progress. So far, they have discovered that we are seeing some progress in the water properties. I interviewed the leader of the event and he said, 

“We had dolphins visit us from the ocean because they were chasing the fish, proving that we have some wildlife coming back to our river. I see a positive outlook for the future of our river.” – Christian Murphy

On Saturday, February 18th, we we spent a few hours on Randalls Island. A few things I had not known prior about Randalls Island is that it was previously a land fill which has now become the island which contains many marshes, multiple species of birds and beaches.

Randalls Island has many initiatives to allow its community to participate in a more sustainable city. With their Urban Farms of 40,000 square feet, they have 100 beds, two greenhouses, four rice paddies and a fruit orchid tree. Their Urban Farm not only allows New York City visitors to have a larger understanding of where food comes from, but it allows participating schools to come and help on the farms through their Edible Education Program. To learn more about what Urban Farms plan on doing this year, I reached out to to the Urban Farms coordinator through email and still am waiting for a response.

In our time there, I was able to learn about a part of New York I had never been to before. I enjoyed walking and exploring the area while learning so much about it too. Overall, this little journey outside of the city had opened my eyes to what could be done everywhere with landfills and areas where there needs to be a more sustainable approach. Randalls island was not only beautiful but allows everyone to participate and experience a greener city.

We have to understand the problem to understand the solution. In the case of climate change, it’s one umbrella problem with many, many different contributing parts.

PROBLEM: Emissions

Greenhouse Gas Emissions By Top Emitters

SOLUTIONS

Solutions fall under two main categories:

1. Reduce Sources — bringing emissions to zero

2. Support Sinks — uplifting nature’s carbon cycle.

• Electricity
  
  • Renewable energy: Wind, Solar, Nuclear, Hydroelectric, Geothermal, Biomass (from plants). In the US, the renewable solution with the highest potential for impact is in wind power. The wind-energy potential of just three states — Kansas, North Dakota, and Texas — would be sufficient to meet electricity demand from coast to coast. In other parts of the world, solar farms have massive potential. Some researchers predict it could rise from two percent of the global electricity mix to meet 20 percent of global energy needs by 2027, especially if supplemented at scale with rooftop solar.
    
  • Increase efficiency: Lighten the load of electricity consumption with more energy-efficient lights, machinery, technology, etc.
    
  • Improve energy transmission: Effective long-distance transmission lines so that countries that overproduce renewable energy (like Morocco with solar) can export it to other countries without it going to waster
    
  • Improve energy storage: If you can capture electricity from renewables during its high-production hours and store it to be used later, you don’t have to dip into the grid during those off-hours
    

• Refrigerants
  
  • Phase Out HFCs: Refrigerants, specifically chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), are thousands of times more damaging to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. They were key culprits in depleting the ozone layer, and they were phased out in 1987. But many are still in circulation, and must be disposed of properly to limit the emissions impact. Of all climate solutions, Drawdown ranks this #1 in actual, bang-for-your-buck impact.
    

• Food/Agriculture
  
  • Reduce Food Waste: ⅓ of the world’s food supply is wasted every year. If wasted food were a country, it would be the third largest producer of carbon dioxide in the world, after the U.S. and China. The food we waste contributes 4.4 gigatons of CO2-equivalent into the atmosphere each year — roughly eight percent of total anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions.
    
  • Silvopasture: In Brazil and elsewhere, ranching is a driver of mass deforestation. Cattle and other ruminants require 30 to 45 percent of the world’s arable land, and livestock produce a huge amount of emissions. Silvopasture is the integration of trees into pasture.
    
  • Shade-grown crops: This is similar to silvopasture except that it means integrating taller trees into fields with crops such as cocoa and coffee
    
  • Adoption of a plant-rich diet: The most conservative estimates suggest that raising livestock accounts for nearly 15 percent of global greenhouse gases emitted each year; the most comprehensive assessments of direct and indirect emissions say more than 50 percent.
    

• Economics
  
  • Concessional finance: Below market rate finance provided by major financial institutions, such as development banks and multilateral funds, to developing countries to accelerate development objectives.
    
  • Government subsidies: When governments subsidize renewable energy and other green practices, it makes them more feasible and shifts jobs away from fossil fuel industries and toward greener industries
    
  • Green investments: Convince investors that sustainable businesses are worthy investments. Socially responsible investing has become a buzzy topic, with green investment portfolios and funds on the rise.
    

• Education
  
  • Educate girls: Decoupling economic growth from emissions at the required scale—and doing it fast enough—is a tall order, especially considering expected population growth. This makes family planning hugely important, and one of the best ways to curb population growth is to educate girls and young women around the globe.
    
  • Informing the public: The more people are aware of the trajectory we are currently on, the more public sentiment will turn toward supporting green policies and businesses, and that consumer/constituent behavior will make it politically and financially expedient to court their favor

• Transportation 
  
  • Encourage mass transit: Governments can improve and subsidize access to public transit infrastructure like bikes, subways, etc.
    
  • Transition to electric vehicles. The transportation sector is a large and diverse sector that encompasses road, aviation, rail, and marine transport: both the movement of passengers and movement of goods. 45 percent of total transportation emissions came from passenger vehicles, 29 percent from road freight vehicles, 12 percent from aviation, 11 percent from international shipping, less than 1 percent from rail, and the final 2 percent from other sources. So a transition to EV at scale would be massively impactful.
    
  • Fuel efficiency. When transporting people and things at scale in our globalized world, more efficient use of fuel in aviation, shipping, etc. can go a long way to reduce emissions
    
    
• Environmental restoration/carbon sequestering
  
  • Restore forests: In recent decades, forests    have suffered extensive clearing, fragmentation, degradation, and depletion of flora and fauna. Once blanketing 12 percent of the world’s land masses, tropical forests now cover just five percent. When we lose forests, primarily to agricultural expansion or human settlement, we lose the “lungs of the world”
    
  • Bamboo production: Fast-growing bamboo rapidly sequesters carbon in biomass and soil and can thrive on degraded lands. Long-lived bamboo products can store carbon over time.
    
  • Coastal wetland protection: Mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrasses sequester huge amounts of carbon in plants and soil. Protecting them inhibits degradation and safeguards their carbon sinks.

Drawdown is a great resource on this stuff, and they tend to rank solutions in two ways: ones aimed at the biggest carbon problems, and solutions that can have the biggest immediate impact.  

Their top 10 solutions, ranked in terms of emissions reduction potential over a 30-year period: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/news/drawdown-top-10-solutions-to-reverse-climate-change/

Drawdown’s full list of solutions: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions

Announcements

Next week there will be NO CLASS on Tuesday, Feb. 14; instead we will be doing a field trip to Randall’s Island on the following Saturday, Feb. 18.

We will be welcoming two guest speakers on Tuesday, Feb. 28: Samantha Maldonado, who covers climate for the local news publication The City, and Dr. Brett Branco, Director of the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay.

Scientist’s Perspective on Communicating About Climate Change

by Prof. Zarnoch

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BREAK

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In-Class Exercise and Discussion

Break into groups and take a look at the recent piece of climate change journalism your group is assigned. Discuss it together and be prepared to talk knowledgeably about it to the rest of the class. Considering the story within the frameworks we’ve just discussed, what are your thoughts on the piece you read?

CNN: A dire forecast: Scientists used AI to find planet could cross critical warming threshold sooner than expected

Washington Post: U.S. emissions rose slightly in 2022. They need to be falling rapidly.

The Guardian: Governments urged to confront effects of climate crisis on migrants

MarketWatch: Here’s why a record-setting lack of snow in NYC is pretty chilling

Deutsche Welle: Can ‘untested’ carbon removal technology BECCS deliver?

LA Times: Why helping whales to flourish can help fight climate change

INTRO TO CLIMATE CHANGE

by Prof. Zarnoch

Hello and welcome to the 2023 Locke course: How Science and Storytelling Intersect.

Chester Zarnoch

Website

Emily Johnson
Website, Heat of the Moment podcast

Course Description

This course explores the role journalism plays in calling the world’s attention to climate change—arguably the most important story of our time, but one that often falls off the front pages as other stories dominate the news cycle. Students will examine the intersection of science and storytelling and discuss the multitude of ways journalists across all types of media can approach climate coverage, from local New York stories about climate change adaptation to international reporting on green investments and climate migration. Students will obtain a deeper understanding of climate change science and develop the skills needed to communicate science to the public making it accessible, relatable, and actionable. The course will include guest speakers and field trips.

Syllabus

The syllabus is below. You can also easily find it in the future by clicking on the Syllabus page at the top of the class site, and on Blackboard. Please note that the schedule and deadlines are subject to change based on availability of guest speakers, how quickly we get through things, etc.

Locke 2023 Course Syllabus

Introductions

Let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves. Tell us your name, your major, and a little bit about your overall perception/feelings on climate change, and how it is (or is not!) covered in the news. Finally, what are you hoping to get out of this class?

Introduction to Climate Change from a Journalist’s Perspective

The question of reporting on this issue. How do you reach people and get them to care, to take action?

Here are some of the challenges:

-Political polarization. The number one predictor of whether someone agrees with the science of climate change is where they fall on the political spectrum. It’s also an incredibly inconvenient fact, economically speaking, for a lot of countries and industries. So that right there is a real hurdle when it comes to reaching a huge swathe of the population. How do we combat this as reporters?

GOP thrusts gas stoves, Biden’s green agenda into the culture wars

Liberal media made slew of dubious claims about climate change, year-end report finds

-News value. What is the definition of news? In many cases, climate change stories tend to get lost in the noise of other stories that have more immediate impact on people. How do you find ways to make the story feel more immediate/pressing/relevant to people at the local, national, and international level? What does the term “angle” mean in journalism?

Journalism is Failing Us

-Human nature. It’s easy to feel a bit nihilistic about an issue that is so much bigger than any one individual, and get discouraged that using energy-efficient light bulbs and bringing our own tote bags to the grocery store is just a drop in the bucket compared to what needs to happen to halt the progression of climate change. What are some ways journalists can avoid this potential pitfall? What are some of the different categories of journalism/types of stories?

Vox: Yes, you can actually do something about climate change

-Taking a potentially dry subject and making it sexy. For the non-scientist, research papers and abstracts might read as boring or unintelligible, full of jargon. It’s the job of the journalist to translate their findings into plain English and place them within a context that makes it clear what the stakes are, and find examples that make it feel real, and tangible, with actual human impact, often at the local level specifically. What are some ways of doing this?

Podcast: Talking Green Without Seeing Red

-The financial realities of the journalism industry. In the digital era, many news organizations are struggling to stay afloat. Local newspapers have been gutted, and even major legacy print publications have had to reinvent themselves to stay alive. Unfortunately, this means that coverage can be driven not just by what editors and reporters deem to be newsworthy, but by what drives clicks and cable news ratings. What are some examples of this?

Introduction to Climate Change from a Scientist’s Perspective

BREAK

Take 15 minutes.

In-Class Exercise and Discussion

Break into groups and take a look at the recent piece of climate change journalism your group is assigned. Discuss it together and be prepared to talk knowledgeably about it to the rest of the class. Considering the story within the framework we’ve just discussed, what are your thoughts on the piece you read?

CNN: A dire forecast: Scientists used AI to find planet could cross critical warming threshold sooner than expected

Washington Post: U.S. emissions rose slightly in 2022. They need to be falling rapidly.

The Guardian: Governments urged to confront effects of climate crisis on migrants

MarketWatch: Here’s why a record-setting lack of snow in NYC is pretty chilling

Deutsche Welle: Can ‘untested’ carbon removal technology BECCS deliver?