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I just took quick notice of the fact that my climate change-related posts increase dramatically each winter as the warming of the planet is felt here in Minneapolis more than other places in the country.

They tell us that it is a “brown” Christmas about 30% of the time for as long as records were kept, however, I think that conflates the lack of precipitation with the warm temperatures. My phone tells me it rained about .4″ today – that should’ve been good enough for 4-6 inches of snow, but instead, we got mud and big ruts on the hill where the kids were practicing.

The impact on my kids’s (and my) psyche is pretty strong. The sound of rain all last night on the roof did not make for an easy wake up to go skiing this morning.

Four Takeaways From the COP28 Climate Summit

It took 28 years of climate negotiations for world leaders to agree to wean the global economy from the principal source of climate change: the burning of fossil fuels.

Great. They’ve been working on this almost as long as I’ve been blogging.

In the meantime – as I told the kids this morning, we need to keep on loving the things we love to do outdoors so we don’t lose the reason to keep up the fight for the climate.

Well, it’s the eve of the election. The PolyMet mine is a good example of what is at stake. Strong environmental regulations, or whatever you would call what this administration has done.

This opinion article in MinnPost today – Two years after the much-litigated PolyMet permits were issued, some facts aren’t in dispute – is well worth a read.

 This polluted water would be stored in a 900-acre pond, which would need to be maintained continuously by pumps, and held back, indefinitely, by a dam taller than the dome at the Minnesota Capitol.

The dam holding back the massive amounts of pollution and waste would be made from mine tailings stacked on top of other mine tailings stacked on top of unstable peats and slimes — the “upstream” design. This is the type of dam that failed catastrophically at Brumadinho in Brazil and at Mount Polley in Canada. It’s the type of dam that has been banned in countries around the world, including Brazil, Chile and Peru. And engineers have been clear they fear more catastrophes await if this design continues to be used.

Insanity.

Was just discussing with Doug how if you’ve lived in Minneapolis for the past 40 years, you believe climate change is happening.

Saint Paul’s lakes will never freeze thickly and quickly again. People will never harvest blocks of ice, never again build a fantastic palace of frozen water. A tradition that’s as old as anything in this city is dead forever.

Source: twin city sidewalks: The Last Ice Palace of Saint Paul

This land is your land, this land is my land…

President Donald Trump sharply reduced the size of two national monuments in Utah on Monday by some two million acres, the largest rollback of federal land protection in the nation’s history.

Source: Trump Slashes Size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Monuments – The New York Times

Great post here on the topic of changes you can make in your own lives.

A lot of people ask me how they can live more sustainably, and help combat global environmental issues like climate change in their own lives. Here’s my advice.

Knowing that people are very busy, and most don’t really want long, complicated lists of things to do, here are my suggestions…

Source: So, What Can I Do?

(No hard frost yet.)

We watched Before the Flood on friday night. Leonardo Di Caprio’s new movie on climate change. It contains some powerful imagery of the effects of climate change that are happening right now. To see the tar sands in alberta or a mountaintop removal in west virgina is staggering.

How can I take action? I think I’ve taken many of the easy (lightbulbs) and privileged (efficient cars) routes. I offset all of our airplane travel through Nature Conservancy. So what’s next?

Beef.

Beef clearly has a bigger impact on the environment than other forms of protein, and the movie presents a number of compelling examples such as the equivalency of eating a 1/2lb. burger vs. driving your prius 50 miles.

Here is one news article from a couple of years ago: Giving up beef will reduce carbon footprint more than cars

Beef’s environmental impact dwarfs that of other meat including chicken and pork, new research reveals, with one expert saying that eating less red meat would be a better way for people to cut carbon emissions than giving up their cars.

So, here we go…

Reducing humanity’s carbon pollution will certainly be logistically difficult, but its roots are essentially blameless – by the time climate change was a problem, nations had built their economies on cheap fossil fuel – and conceptually simple: pollute less. It’s comforting to think that, if humanity can fix Earth’s climate, nature’s problems will be also be solved.

But that’s not the case.

Source: Why we need to stop thinking so much about climate c…

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was currently digging through Countdown by Alan Weisman. It should be abundantly clear that there is so much more to protecting the earth and environment than climate change alone.

The author nails it in this final quote, we have trouble debating even the most conceptually simple problems, let alone beginning to tackle the reduction of our footprint on complex ecosystems.