Updates from Maine on the polar votex outbreak roaring through the Northeast:
Saturday morning, 8 am ET
Friday night, 10 pm EG
Friday afternoon, 4:45 pm ET
Friday, 2:30 pm ET
Meet the planet’s publicist
Join my Columbia Climate School Sustain What webcast for the latest on the insane polar vortex outbreak hitting us in Maine and across New England and New York and to meet and engage with David Fenton, who’s spent more than 40 years developing media campaigns for progressive causes and fighting climate change and has a new book out full of tips and insights. Paste these links in your calendar to watch on YouTube, or Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (at @revkin). Click here for detaiils on the show and here for David Fenton’s website.
When polar air comes to town
The fast-moving polar blast targeting the Northeast has me renewing my call for the federal government to pair the heat.gov portal launched last summer by an array of agencies with cold.gov. It’s a dangerous gap in hazard communication.
Read my argument here and more below on how it’s vital to cut the threat all extreme weather poses to those most vulnerable among us - with or without global warming.
Don’t get sidetracked by seductive debates over whether cold or heat kills more. Both extremes killl too many people, both in the United States and worldwide.
Read this fantastic summary of the latest science and statistics by Patrick Brown, the co-director of the Climate & Energy group at the Breakthrough Institute and an adjunct lecturer in Energy Policy & Climate at Johns Hopkins University:
And don’t get distracted by debates over how much global warming might be contributing to winter polar air outbreaks or storms. This is an important research frontier with lots of early-days science, and journalists - including me - love new science. But be prepared for what I call the whiplash effect as you track divergent research. And avoid getting sucked in by “single study syndrome” - through which the confirmation bias we all have torques our conclusions away from reality.
Play this climate crisis thought experiment
To assess the best policies facing extreme weather in a warming climate, play this thought experiment: The world suddenly gets serious about cutting carbon dioxide and methane and governments get on the Paris Agreement track for emissions.
How soon will that show up measurably in patterns of extreme cold or hot weather? At the very least, it’d take decades given natural variability and simple momentum, as a veteran MIT climate researcher, John Reilly, explained super succinctly to me long ago:
This is why I keep saying it’s vital to slow climate change to limit odds of worst-case outcomes. But it’s also vtial to cut climate risk now on the ground through smart investments of loal, federal and international effort and money, and through communication innovations fostering community capacities to identify and reduce hot spots of exposure and vulnerability.
A devastating incident in Michigan in January reveals the importance of basic social safety nets in building a climate-safe society. I learned about the freezing deaths of a despondent and disoriented mother and two of her three children through a Twitter post by a Michigan public health worker:
In a supportive reply to a tweet of mine about the need for cold.gov, she wrote: “We just had a tragic situation here in MI of a mother and 2 of her 3 children dying of exposure. The were clearly weaknesses with the response and a sheriff's deputy resigned. Have you seen good examples of how communities have improved their vigilance?”
That question is a good one. I’ve seen examples on the extreme-heat front, particularly as described on past Sustain What webcasts by Kristie Ebi, the University of Washington expert on climate and health who has repeatedly said “nobody needs to die in a heat wave.”
But I’d love to hear examples where cold is the threat. Weigh in!
Stephanie (she said she prefers to remain anonymous because she works at a Michigan agency) added some important insights on how health agencies and public spending aren’t well shaped to to the task of boosting community resilience:
“The point about 'bolstering the care economy' is really important. In addition points about funding & resources, public health practice is still largely focused on specific things people can do for themselves and practically nothing about public health through community care…. There's a persistent cognitive disconnect between climate change and public health from on high that also needs to be fixed.”
I’ll be trying to explore this more. In the meantime, I hope you’ll explore and share this previous posts:
Circling back to cold weather, I highly recommend this webiunar on heat pump performance tips in cold climates:
Thanks for reading and engaging. And please share this post with others.
Tracking a Flash -17° F Polar Vortex, Talking Climate Communication with Earth's Publicist