25 good reasons to care about climate change

Climate change is a tough cause to rally ‘round—even those who understand that it’s happening and that it’s human-caused get distracted by things like eating, working, having sex, watching TV, or watching people on TV have sex.

Here is a Grist list of good reasons to care about this global crisis. Got reasons of your own? Let me know in the comments section below.

1. Because supermodels are stripping for the cause.
2. Because you don’t want your insurance premiums to go up.
3. Because you like to ski.
4. Because you’re a raging hypochondriac.
5. Because it’s a good excuse to learn weird things.
6. Because you hate oil.
7. Because you love oil.
8. Because you eat rice.
9. Because Stephen Colbert does.
10. Because the Christian Coalition does.
11. Because it will create jobs.
12. Because you live near water.
13. Because Kardashians interest you more than Katrinas.
14. Because you like breathing.
15. Because colorful coral jewelry completes most of your outfits.
16. Because you won’t be able to hold up your end of a conversation with Obama, Lucy Lawless, Glenn Beck, Evander Holyfield, or the Pope if you don’t.
17. Because colorful fall leaves are so pretty.
18. Because you don’t want to serve embarrassing champagne.
19. Because you like lights to come on when you flip a switch.
20. Because: “insect feeding frenzy.”
21. Because you support the recycled-soda-bottle fleece industry.
22. Because you think it’s depressing when old people die alone in hot apartments.
23. Because you think it’s depressing when little kids die.
24. Because everyone at Grist cares.
25. Because if we stop climate change, we can stop earnest lists like this.

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Making a Green Change in Your Life

Modern living has some pitfalls in terms of environmental friendliness. User-friendly modern gadgets have at times pushed farther our propinquity to attaining the green splendor of living. Here are some suggestions to making a green change in your life and for our environment:

• EAT VEGETABLES. All you have to do is stop eating beef. Worldwide, beef production contributes more to climate change than the ­entire transportation sector. The carbon footprint of the average meat eater is about 1.5 tons of CO2 larger than that of a vegetarian. Cutting beef out of your diet will reduce your CO2 emissions by 2,400 pounds annually.
• TAP DRINK . You can save money and your environment by giving up bottled water. The production of plastic water bottles together with the privatization of our drinking water is an environmental and social catastrophe. Bottled water costs more per gallon than gasoline. The average American consumes 30 gallons of bottled water annually. Giving up one bottle of imported water means using up one less liter of fossil fuel and emitting 1.2 pounds less of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
• ECO-SABBATH. For one day or afternoon or even one hour a week, don’t buy anything, don’t use any machines, don’t switch on anything electric, don’t cook, don’t answer your phone, and, in general, don’t use any resources. In other words, for this regular period, give yourself and the planet a break. Every hour per week that you live no impact cuts your carbon emissions by 0.6 percent annually. Commit to four hours per week, that’s 2.4 percent; do it for a whole day each week to cut your impact by 14.4 percent a year.
• TITHE YOUR INCOME. Tithe a fixed percentage of your income to non-profits of your choice. If an average U.S. family contributes 1 percent ($502.33) of its annual income ($50,233) to an environmental non-profit, they could offset 40.7 tons of carbon dioxide per year. Many of our public health and welfare services are tied to consumer spending which, in turn, depends upon planetary resources. If you want to help, don’t go shopping. Just help.
• BUILD A COMMUNITY. Have dinners with friends. Play charades. Sing together. Enjoying each other costs the planet much less than enjoying its resources.
• GET THERE UNDER YOUR OWN STEAM. Get around by bike or by foot a certain number of days a month. Not only does this mean using less fossil fuel and creating less greenhouse gases, it means you’ll get exercise and we’ll all breathe fewer fumes. If you can stay off the road just two days a week, you’ll reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 1,590 pounds per year.
• COMMIT TO NOT WASTING. Wasting resources costs the planet and your wallet. Let your clothes hang-dry instead of using the dryer. Take half the trips but stay twice as long. Repair instead of rebuy. The list goes on. In the summer, for every degree above 72°F you set your thermostat, you save 120 pounds of CO2 emissions per year, and if you wash your clothes with cold water you can cut your laundry energy use by up to 90 percent.
• TAKE YOUR PRINCIPLES TO WORK. We must act as though we care about the world at work as much as we do at home. Company CEOs or product designers have the power to make a gigantic difference through their business, and so do the rest of us. In commercial buildings, lighting accounts for more than 40 percent of electrical energy use, a huge cause of greenhouse gas production. Using motion and occupancy sensors can cut this use by 10 percent.
• DONATE A DAY'S TV TIME TO ECO-SERVICE. Take one day off from TV—the average American watches four and a half hours of TV a day—and try voluntary eco-service instead. Those four and a half hours a day watching TV add up to 825 pounds of carbon dioxide each year.
• BELIEVE WITH ALL YOUR HEART THAT HOW YOU LIVE YOUR LIFE MAKES A DIFFERENCE. We are all interconnected. Every step toward living a conscious life provides support to everyone else who is trying to do the same thing—whether you’re aware of it or not. We are the masters of our destinies.

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• Why Going Green - and the Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen - Matter Now More than Ever (takepart.com)
• Green Diary Rescue & Open Thread: Food & Climate (dailykos.com)
• Would you rather switch off lights or take less foreign holidays? (telegraph.co.uk)
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Design for Adaptation: Living in a Climate-Changing World

Climate scientists have been speaking out for decades about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid a significantly warmer and less livable future. Now that climate change is finally part of the public discussion, the future is already here—and it’s only getting warmer. Designing energy-efficient buildings is an important step toward preventing more drastic warming. We need to redouble these efforts—the 2030 Challenge goal of carbon-neutral buildings by 2030 will be a difficult yet critical standard to meet. But by stopping there, are we turning a blind eye to the changes that scientists say are coming even if greenhouse gas emissions were turned off tomorrow? More and more experts acknowledge that while we must continue to do all we can to slow greenhouse gas emissions, we must also begin designing buildings that will work in a changing climate. This article examines the science of global climate change and looks at how we can adapt the built environment to a world that will, by most accounts, be very different by the end of this century from the one we know today.

The living space in this new home built by Global Green in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans is elevated four feet (1.2 m) to keep it above expected flood level. Numerous other “passive survivability” features are included.

Debate may continue in some circles about whether humans are causing climate change, or even whether it is happening at all, but the scientific consensus is overwhelmingly clear. A report issued in June 2009 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGRP)—which coordinates climate change research of 13 federal agencies and operated as the U.S. Climate Change Science Program from 2002 through 2008 under the George W. Bush presidency—estimates that global average temperatures have risen approximately 1.5ºF (0.8ºC) since before the Industrial Revolution and could rise another 2ºF–11ºF (1.1ºC–6.1ºC) by the end of this century, based on modeling of a variety of greenhouse gas emissions levels, mitigation efforts, and economic scenarios. “The reality of climate change is unequivocal—we see it in many aspects of the Earth’s climate system,” said Jonathan Overpeck, Ph.D., co-director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the USGCRP report.