Climate Simplified and Hope In Action
From our Founder, Anita Galeana
Climate Change Definitions
NOAA: Changes in average weather conditions persisting over multiple decades or longer, involving shifts in temperature, precipitation, and the frequency of severe weather.
NASA: Long-term shifts in average weather patterns driven largely by human activities (like burning fossil fuels) that increase greenhouse gases and raise global temperatures.
Thoughts and feelings about climate change range from denial or disbelief to discomfort, confusion, high anxiety, and even despair. Many people just want to ignore it all together because life is already challenging enough and it’s not a fun topic for a dinner conversation. However, with extreme weather events such as heat domes, floods, fires, and glacial melting, it is impossible not to take notice. To continue to refute climate change induced by human activities is dangerous for the future of the planet and everyone that inhabits earth. But fear not, because there are plenty of reasons for hope.
The purpose of this blog is to provide an easy-to-understand overview of our changing climate and to provide you with small actions we can all easily take to mitigate our impact on the planet. It will also require that we hold businesses and our governments accountable for their policies which have profound impacts on solving this problem. Corporate profits without regard to the impacts on our environment, our health, the planet and our communities is not sustainable if we all want to thrive. What this blog doesn’t provide is charts, loads of data and statistics. Together we can lessen some of the worst-case scenarios and if we’re smart, we can solve this climate crisis.
The difficult truth is that climate change is one of the most urgent crises facing the world today. As a Californian, I have experienced climate change in the form of wildfires, drought and flooding from “atmospheric rivers”. The changing climate is already impacting weather patterns, agriculture, delicate ecosystems, human health, wildfires, and water resources. A warmer planet of just 2-3 degrees Fahrenheit has already contributed to untold natural disasters worldwide. It will take an informed population, advocacy, personal will, and accountability from corporations and governments to change the status quo. By status quo I am referring to business as usual: endless economic growth; resource extraction and the burning of coal, oil, and gas; and industrial-scale farming.
The air we breathe, the water we drink, the land we live on belong to all of us and all life on earth. It’s hard to ignore the tragedies of the 2026 fires in Spokane, Utah, France, or the flooding in Texas and Appalachia in 2025, or the 11 inches of rain over 3 days that flooded parts of Indiana this summer. If you’ve lived more than 40-50 years you know that the climate has changed in your lifetime. If it feels like natural climate disasters are occurring at an ever more frequent rate, that’s because they are. Tornado alley, which was once located across the Great Plains, has shifted to the east. Hurricane winds have intensified and because ocean temperatures are warmer these storms hold and release more moisture. A hurricane that stalls over land can cause more damage from flooding than high winds. And our fire season is longer and more intense.
Why should we care?
Because climate change affects every single place on our planet, leaving no region safe from its impacts. If we care about the world our children and grandchildren will inherit, we can’t keep ignoring the problem and hope it will miraculously disappear. We also need to be careful about reading misinformation on-line. Misinformation and propaganda is placed on social media platforms and repeated by news pundits. This information is created or repeated by people who have something to gain or corporations who benefit from the status quo and doing business without environmental regulations or regards to long term adverse effects. It’s reminiscent of the tobacco industry who denied nicotine was unhealthy.
Have you heard, “we’ve always had fires on earth, hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, and droughts”? This is true. However, it’s also true that since the start of the industrial age in the 1850s, burning coal, oil, and gas has released high amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into our atmosphere. These molecules along with other greenhouse gases (GHG) act like a thermal blanket in the atmosphere and trap heat. Methane, another very potent GHG, is produced by livestock such as cattle, cows, pigs, goats, and many other animals. Methane and CO2 are both released during decomposition of garbage in a landfill and from disturbing or draining wetlands. Even termites in some parts of the world produce significant amounts of methane from digesting the wood they eat on the forest floor. And their numbers have risen as deforestation rises. The simple fact is that “Human activities have raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50% in less than 200 years.”
The science behind the sharp rise in CO2?
Scientists can measure CO2 and other gases in the atmosphere by using recent historical data and comparing it to the CO2 measured from tiny air bubbles stored in 800,000 years old ice cores from Antarctica. Professor David McGee, an associate professor in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences said, “We've been able to reconstruct carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere going back not just hundreds of years, but hundreds of thousands of years, to understand how carbon dioxide levels have changed through time, and how those changes have been related to changes in global temperature.”
Interestingly, 54-56 million years ago there was an abrupt global warming event driven by a massive release of carbon, sulfur and methane (greenhouse gases) into the atmosphere and oceans. While the cause of that release is unknown, this global warming event lasted 200,000 years. What is shocking is the amount of carbon released during that warming event was only a fraction of what is being released today.
Climate change is not the same as weather.
Remember, the definition of climate change is average weather patterns and the long-term rise in Earth’s average temperature that persist over decades or longer. Weatheris local and happens over hours or days. There is even a new field of science that deals with trying to determine how global warming contributes to weather events. According to NOAA at Climate.gov:
“All extreme [weather] events have multiple causes. Extreme event attribution is the science of detecting whether manmade global warming was one of them.
Extreme event attribution can tell us whether global warming made an event more likely or more severe, but it can't tell us if global warming "caused" an event in a yes-or-no sort of way.” Extreme event attribution: the climate versus weather blame game
Climate change is about more than just gas emissions.
It is driven by how we live, eat, and build. Activities like deforestation, heavy manufacturing (steel, plastic, electronics), industrial farming, animal farming, and transportation (sea, land and air) all add to climate change. The stakes are high: even a seemingly small 2-3 °F rise can disrupt global weather patterns and trigger severe crop failures and biodiversity loss that threaten mass extinction of insects, wildlife, and plants worldwide. Many scientists believe we are already experiencing the Sixth Mass Extinction.
Life Unbalanced
The oceans around the world absorb vast amounts of the excessive CO2, but not without problems. Ocean ecosystems (things like living coral reefs and underwater kelp forests) cannot adapt fast enough to the rapid changes in the amount of carbon dioxide and warmer ocean temperatures. All life requires balancing many factors to maintain health. As humans, if we eat too much sugar and fat over a lifetime, we can develop diabetes and heart disease. Too much carbon in the ocean causes acidification and prevents the coral from developing a hard exoskeleton. And warmer ocean temperatures cause corals to eject the algae they require for food, which can lead to the death of coral. This is what scientists mean when they say they observe bleaching of coral reefs. This is an important ocean ecosystem, normally teeming with fish. It is a big part of the ocean’s food web. The collapse of one system can lead to the collapse of another.
Why does this matter?
According to the Climate Reality Project, human beings are experiencing rising rates of heart and lung diseases caused by poor air quality, increased instances of extreme weather/climate events like wildfires, hurricanes, floods and droughts, as well as crop failure and food insecurity. A landmark 2024 study published in the journalNature revealed that tropical cyclones and hurricanes indirectly cause an average of 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths per storm, with elevated mortality risks persisting for nearly 15 years after landfall. Climate change is happening at a global scale, but it severely impacts the poorest communities on the planet because they are most vulnerable to climate change and least able to cope with the devastation following an extreme weather event and crop failure. There will be regions in the not distant future that will be uninhabitable due to sea level rise, storms and droughts. These changes will create full-blown humanitarian disasters.
Even if you don’t care about a warmer planet, the economic losses due directly from climate change will impact every American. The losses will be staggering in a world that warms 3-5 degrees Fahrenheit. We are already feeling the fallout from rising insurance costs or the inability to insure our homes, and higher food prices due to crop failures caused by heat, floods or pests. Construction workers and other professionals who work outdoors lose hours of work due to extreme heat. One community in San Mateo County built higher sea walls along the San Francisco Bay to make their community more resilient against sea level rise. But what about the communities next to them? Water will displace and move to a different location nearby that is without seawall enforcement. Either way, the cost to coastal communities is an untold amount of money.
What Can We Do?
Reduce or Avoid Fossil Fuel Use
Avoid fossil-fuel powered equipment (leaf blowers, lawnmowers, rototillers).
Mulching mowers finely mince grass clippings and push them back into the turf as natural fertilizer.
Leave the leaves on the ground– they can improve soil health.
Consider a hybrid or an electric car the next time you need to buy a car.
Switch to Solar Energy but do your research first and look for incentives from local or state governments.
Replace your gas heater with a heat-pump. The next time you need a new furnace, replace it with a heat-pump. There is a caveat if you live in California, where electricity is expensive. However, if you already have solar power you’ll save energy and money with a heat-pump.
Reduce or Eliminate Single-use Plastics (see our previous blog about plastics).
Support your local, and state politicians who champion climate change resilience, clean energy bills, and other conservation policies. Don’t forget to write to your representatives and let them know what you care about.
Reuse and Reduce Goods. Instead of buying new, consider swapping clothes, shopping at thrift stores, borrowing or renting equipment.
Conserve Water. It takes energy to extract raw water, treat it to make it safe to drink, pump it through a distribution network, and then return that same water wastewater to a treatment plant. If you live in the Western United States, drought conditions make this even more critical. Landscape water can also be conserved by planting native or drought tolerant plants. Always keep soil mulched 2-3 inches. Some municipalities offer mulch for free.
Buy local produce in season, and/or grow your own veggies.
Compost your own food scrapsandlater you can use the compost in your garden.
Keep soil covered with mulchas this is very beneficial to the soil and environment.
Stay informed and be positive. We can all create the world we want when we work together to solve problems.
Additional Resources:
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
How to fire safe your landscape
https://ucanr.edu/sites/fire/Preparedness/
https://ucanr.edu/sites/fire/Preparedness/Landscaping/Mulch/
https://ucanr.edu/sites/fire/files/294538.pdf
Thank you to all the volunteers, staff and scientists who work at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and the many non-profit organizations that are helping make California a more resilient and sustainable environment for all who live here.
