The protest poster in the sky

Can we help people understand it?

Jun 16, 2023

Those heartwarming editorial conferences with Buddy ended a year ago this week. But his memory is with us every day, guiding our thoughts about climate, ecology and Nature.

For a couple of decades, I and thousands of others have been trying to draw everyone’s eyes to the dangers of global warming. Most of our efforts have had little effect. It’s not easy to create a scene that dramatizes climate change effectively. Polar bears, cracked riverbeds, flooded streets? Meh.

What we’ve really wanted is a big sign. About danger. About us.

Remember those movie classics, the families in their front yards, clutching each other and looking up in horror at the alien spaceship, the approaching tornado, the comet growing larger, the formation of bombers? We’ve needed a creepy, scary, horrifying visual like that, a scene that says trouble’s coming, take cover, get ready to fight, this is about you!

This month we got our wish!

The sky became dark and discolored across a dozen states. It wasn’t just an ugly sight, it had an ugly smell and taste, an ugly feeling.

Until now, if people in the green and leafy Northeast looked at arid Western cities covered in smoke from wildfires, they could say, that can’t happen here, thank God. On Tuesday, it did: For a moment, New York’s air quality was worse than it was in Delhi, the infamous pollution capital where average life spans are reduced more than nine years by particulates in the air. By evening, New York had registered the worst air quality in the world among major cities. [David Wallace-Wells, New York Times essayist]

Bad air across the East is now dissipating this week, but authorities are predicting similar or worse spectacles throughout North America during the summer months ahead.

Looks like climate activists have got their wish! Physical, visible evidence of personal climate danger right in our face, affecting our eyes, nostrils, and vacation plans.

What we can do with this vision

Take it to heart ourselves and create protections for our family.

Regularly check today’s and tomorrow’s Air Quality. Plan our outdoor activities around it.
Learn about the monitors, filters, and purifiers available to make our home more safe. Then choose one and use it. And maybe another where we work.
Display our purifier. Use it to call others’ attention to the big air quality threat from climate change.
Make our own home air purifier. It’s an easy DIY project, and saves money.

Get our neighbors involved in creating protections.

Roll our eyes at local sky when we hear someone cough.
Hold a DIY air purifier construction party for neighboring families, especially their kids.
Put up a public sign showing the local Air Quality forecast, and update it each day.

Work on protection, but emphasize prevention.

We can redouble our efforts to slow carbon emissions. With ubiquitous wildfire smoke as emphasis, our protesting, lobbying, letter writing—whatever we’ve been doing to persuade America to dramatically reduce carbon emissions—should have a wider effect.
Introduce our friends to readings about climate problems. We can refer them to David Wallace-Wells’ columns in the New York Times and his book, The Uninhabitable Earth. Or to Lindsay Nunez’ Save Our Happy Place newsletter with endless tips on simple climate actions.
Hey, we can even point out ClimateDog! After all, Buddy’s newsletter is ranked 36th among the 90 Best Climate Change Blogs and Websites by Feedspot. That’s based on ‘relevancy,’ ‘freshness,’ a high ‘Domain Authority,’ and other measures of usefulness.

While the number of ClimateDog subscribers continues to grow, it’s by individual word of mouth. It’s slow. I dream of waking up one morning to find we have a thousand new subscribers. (It’s happened to many other blogs.) One reader shares one issue they liked with an Instagram Influencer, Twitter Trendsetter, Facebook Fashionista, or other Bellwether, Motivator, or Celebrity. Then one of those Influencers mentions Buddy to their readers, and BANG!

We’ve just been given a big new poster. Let’s wave it!

The protest poster in the sky

Can we help people understand it?

Those heartwarming editorial conferences with Buddy ended a year ago this week. But his memory is with us every day, guiding our thoughts about climate, ecology and Nature.

This month we got our wish!

What we can do with this vision

Discussion about this post