Let’s Make Tomorrow “National Climate Awareness Day”
Here’s the case for setting aside a day to think about climate change, and why that day should be Aug. 23
Not all days are set aside for happy reasons. Think of Memorial Day, dedicated to the nation’s war dead. Like the toll of war, climate change isn’t something to celebrate, but it’s something to remember. We can also commemorate the role of scientists and engineers in identifying climate change, its cause, and the technologies needed to address it.
Picking a date to highlight climate change isn’t easy, given that climate change happens year-round. There’s a good argument, however, in favor of August 23. It was on August 23, 1856, that Eunice Foote’s pathbreaking paper about warming effect of carbon dioxide was presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her experiments proved the reality of what we now call the greenhouse effect. She made the link between CO2 and climate, saying that “an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature. . . must have necessarily resulted.”
August 23 has several advantages as the date for contemplating climate change. First, it provides an opportunity to honor Foote, one of the earliest women in American science and a pioneering women’s rights advocate. I’ve posted about her accomplishments previously, and it would be great to give her some long overdue recognition. The fact that her discovery was more than a century and a half ago also provides a clue to just how deeply grounded climate science is.
Second, because late August closes out the summer, it is a perfect time to think about global warming. Future summers will be even hotter and more devastating. Along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts, it’s also around the peak of hurricane season, a good time to think about climate disruption., while in the West it’s peak fire season. So it’s a good time for people to be thinking about climate change.
Creating National Climate Awareness Day would send a message about the importance of climate change. It would also provide an occasion to educate Americans about the issue. If it can also celebrate modern science, and the contributions of women to science, all the better. And all it would take is a Presidential proclamation.
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About Dan
Dan Farber has written and taught on environmental and constitutional law as well as about contracts, jurisprudence and legislation. Currently at Berkeley Law, he has al…
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I like it. Nice work Dan! Let’s get President Biden on board to send out the proclamation.
EXCELLENT IDEA DAN, UC scholars can make the right things happen TODAY, especially for our newest generations who most desperately need UC to make this happen TODAY.
UC scholars like you can be our international spokespersons to inform, educate and motivate the peoples of earth to make the right things happen TODAY.
THANK YOU DAN.
Thanks for the positive feedback about this idea! Hopefully we can attract some broader attention to it.
Dan, Let us HOPE AND PRAY that Kamala is elected as our next POTUS so she can save Democracy and Civilization.
Her father Donald J. Harris and Mother Shyamala Gopalan met as students as part of a Black student group at Berkeley in 1962.
Kamala was born in Oakland in 1964.
Save civilization? From what? Climate change? The NIPCC ( Non Governmental International Panel on Climate Change) is “an international panel of non-government scientists and scholars who have come together to present a comprehensive, authoritative, and realistic assessment of the science and economics of global warming.”
In their exhaustive reports on all aspects of CAGW concerns, they, like the Petition Project and the Web site CO2 science, reference thousands of peer review reports and open face studies. A synoptic review of these studies indicate that CO2 is strongly net beneficial, and that those benefits (globally increased bio-mass plant and crop growth, increased crop drought and heat resistance, increased crop cold and frost resistance, expanded growing zones) are increasing on a linear basis as atmospheric CO2 concentration increases, and that the purported harms, increased droughts floods, Sea Level rise, extreme weather, acidic oceans, etc… are greatly reduced from the projections and mostly or entirely fail to appear at all. Where is the Climate Emergency?
When a publication uses the term pejorative term “denier” against rational skeptics, advocating the Global Warming hypothesis, then you fall from rational debate, to noon science childish insults.
There are strong arguments against the entire Global Warming assertion… https://anderdaa7.substack.com/p/global-warming
and thousands of PHD scientists are deeply rational skeptics.
All the Best…
Dear Mr. Anderson,
Thanks for your insightful and intelligent comments which expose the fake “climate crisis”.