write a reflective essay entitled climate change how can i help

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Our Future Is Now - A Climate Change Essay by Francesca Minicozzi, '21

Francesca Minicozzi (class of 2021) is a Writing/Biology major who plans to study medicine after graduation. She wrote this essay on climate change for WR 355/Travel Writing, which she took while studying abroad in Newcastle in spring 2020. Although the coronavirus pandemic curtailed Francesca’s time abroad, her months in Newcastle prompted her to learn more about climate change. Terre Ryan Associate Professor, Writing Department

Our Future Is Now

By Francesca Minicozzi, '21 Writing and Biology Major

 “If you don’t mind me asking, how is the United States preparing for climate change?” my flat mate, Zac, asked me back in March, when we were both still in Newcastle. He and I were accustomed to asking each other about the differences between our home countries; he came from Cambridge, while I originated in Long Island, New York. This was one of our numerous conversations about issues that impact our generation, which we usually discussed while cooking dinner in our communal kitchen. In the moment of our conversation, I did not have as strong an answer for him as I would have liked. Instead, I informed him of the few changes I had witnessed within my home state of New York.

Zac’s response was consistent with his normal, diplomatic self. “I have been following the BBC news in terms of the climate crisis for the past few years. The U.K. has been working hard to transition to renewable energy sources. Similar to the United States, here in the United Kingdom we have converted over to solar panels too. My home does not have solar panels, but a lot of our neighbors have switched to solar energy in the past few years.”

“Our two countries are similar, yet so different,” I thought. Our conversation continued as we prepared our meals, with topics ranging from climate change to the upcoming presidential election to Britain’s exit from the European Union. However, I could not shake the fact that I knew so little about a topic so crucial to my generation.

After I abruptly returned home from the United Kingdom because of the global pandemic, my conversation with my flat mate lingered in my mind. Before the coronavirus surpassed climate change headlines, I had seen the number of internet postings regarding protests to protect the planet dramatically increase. Yet the idea of our planet becoming barren and unlivable in a not-so-distant future had previously upset me to the point where a part of me refused to deal with it. After I returned from studying abroad, I decided to educate myself on the climate crisis.

My quest for climate change knowledge required a thorough understanding of the difference between “climate change” and “global warming.” Climate change is defined as “a pattern of change affecting global or regional climate,” based on “average temperature and rainfall measurements” as well as the frequency of extreme weather events. 1   These varied temperature and weather events link back to both natural incidents and human activity. 2   Likewise, the term global warming was coined “to describe climate change caused by humans.” 3   Not only that, but global warming is most recently attributed to an increase in “global average temperature,” mainly due to greenhouse gas emissions produced by humans. 4

I next questioned why the term “climate change” seemed to take over the term “global warming” in the United States. According to Frank Luntz, a leading Republican consultant, the term “global warming” functions as a rather intimidating phrase. During George W. Bush’s first presidential term, Luntz argued in favor of using the less daunting phrase “climate change” in an attempt to overcome the environmental battle amongst Democrats and Republicans. 5   Since President Bush’s term, Luntz remains just one political consultant out of many politicians who has recognized the need to address climate change. In an article from 2019, Luntz proclaimed that political parties aside, the climate crisis affects everyone. Luntz argued that politicians should steer clear of trying to communicate “the complicated science of climate change,” and instead engage voters by explaining how climate change personally impacts citizens with natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and forest fires. 6   He even suggested that a shift away from words like “sustainability” would gear Americans towards what they really want: a “cleaner, safer, healthier” environment. 7

The idea of a cleaner and heathier environment remains easier said than done. The Paris Climate Agreement, introduced in 2015, began the United Nations’ “effort to combat global climate change.” 8   This agreement marked a global initiative to “limit global temperature increase in this century to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels,” while simultaneously “pursuing means to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees.” 9    Every country on earth has joined together in this agreement for the common purpose of saving our planet. 10   So, what could go wrong here? As much as this sounds like a compelling step in the right direction for climate change, President Donald Trump thought otherwise. In June 2017, President Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement with his proclamation of climate change as a “’hoax’ perpetrated by China.” 11   President Trump continued to question the scientific facts behind climate change, remaining an advocate for the expansion of domestic fossil fuel production. 12   He reversed environmental policies implemented by former President Barack Obama to reduce fossil fuel use. 13

Trump’s actions against the Paris Agreement, however, fail to represent the beliefs of Americans as a whole. The majority of American citizens feel passionate about the fight against climate change. To demonstrate their support, some have gone as far as creating initiatives including America’s Pledge and We Are Still In. 14   Although the United States officially exited the Paris Agreement on November 4, 2020, this withdrawal may not survive permanently. 15   According to experts, our new president “could rejoin in as short as a month’s time.” 16   This offers a glimmer of hope.

The Paris Agreement declares that the United States will reduce greenhouse gas emission levels by 26 to 28 percent by the year 2025. 17   As a leader in greenhouse gas emissions, the United States needs to accept the climate crisis for the serious challenge that it presents and work together with other nations. The concept of working coherently with all nations remains rather tricky; however, I remain optimistic. I think we can learn from how other countries have adapted to the increased heating of our planet. During my recent study abroad experience in the United Kingdom, I was struck by Great Britain’s commitment to combating climate change.

Since the United Kingdom joined the Paris Agreement, the country targets a “net-zero” greenhouse gas emission for 2050. 18   This substantial alteration would mark an 80% reduction of greenhouse gases from 1990, if “clear, stable, and well-designed policies are implemented without interruption.” 19   In order to stay on top of reducing emissions, the United Kingdom tracks electricity and car emissions, “size of onshore and offshore wind farms,” amount of homes and “walls insulated, and boilers upgraded,” as well as the development of government policies, including grants for electric vehicles. 20   A strong grip on this data allows the United Kingdom to target necessary modifications that keep the country on track for 2050. In my brief semester in Newcastle, I took note of these significant changes. The city of Newcastle is small enough that many students and faculty are able to walk or bike to campus and nearby essential shops. However, when driving is unavoidable, the majority of the vehicles used are electric, and many British citizens place a strong emphasis on carpooling to further reduce emissions. The United Kingdom’s determination to severely reduce greenhouse emissions is ambitious and particularly admirable, especially as the United States struggles to shy away from its dependence on fossil fuels.

So how can we, as Americans, stand together to combat global climate change? Here are five adjustments Americans can make to their homes and daily routines that can dramatically make a difference:

• Stay cautious of food waste. Studies demonstrate that “Americans throw away up to 40 percent of the food they buy.” 21   By being more mindful of the foods we purchase, opting for leftovers, composting wastes, and donating surplus food to those in need, we can make an individual difference that impacts the greater good. 22   
• Insulate your home. Insulation functions as a “cost-effective and accessible” method to combat climate change. 23   Homes with modern insulation reduce energy required to heat them, leading to a reduction of emissions and an overall savings; in comparison, older homes can “lose up to 35 percent of heat through their walls.” 24   
• Switch to LED Lighting. LED stands for “light-emitting diodes,” which use “90 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs and half as much as compact fluorescents.” 25   LED lights create light without producing heat, and therefore do not waste energy. Additionally, these lights have a longer duration than other bulbs, which means they offer a continuing savings. 26  
• Choose transportation wisely. Choose to walk or bike whenever the option presents itself. If walking or biking is not an option, use an electric or hybrid vehicle which emits less harmful gases. Furthermore, reduce the number of car trips taken, and carpool with others when applicable. 
• Finally, make your voice heard. The future of our planet remains in our hands, so we might as well use our voices to our advantage. Social media serves as a great platform for this. Moreover, using social media to share helpful hints to combat climate change within your community or to promote an upcoming protest proves beneficial in the long run. If we collectively put our voices to good use, together we can advocate for change.

As many of us are stuck at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these suggestions are slightly easier to put into place. With numerous “stay-at-home” orders in effect, Americans have the opportunity to make significant achievements for climate change. Personally, I have taken more precautions towards the amount of food consumed within my household during this pandemic. I have been more aware of food waste, opting for leftovers when too much food remains. Additionally, I have realized how powerful my voice is as a young college student. Now is the opportunity for Americans to share how they feel about climate change. During this unprecedented time, our voice is needed now more than ever in order to make a difference.

However, on a much larger scale, the coronavirus outbreak has shed light on reducing global energy consumption. Reductions in travel, both on the roads and in the air, have triggered a drop in emission rates. In fact, the International Energy Agency predicts a 6 percent decrease in energy consumption around the globe for this year alone. 27   This drop is “equivalent to losing the entire energy demand of India.” 28   Complete lockdowns have lowered the global demand for electricity and slashed CO2 emissions. However, in New York City, the shutdown has only decreased carbon dioxide emissions by 10 percent. 29   This proves that a shift in personal behavior is simply not enough to “fix the carbon emission problem.” 30   Climate policies aimed to reduce fossil fuel production and promote clean technology will be crucial steppingstones to ameliorating climate change effects. Our current reduction of greenhouse gas emissions serves as “the sort of reduction we need every year until net-zero emissions are reached around 2050.” 31   From the start of the coronavirus pandemic, politicians came together for the common good of protecting humanity; this demonstrates that when necessary, global leaders are capable of putting humankind above the economy. 32

After researching statistics comparing the coronavirus to climate change, I thought back to the moment the virus reached pandemic status. I knew that a greater reason underlay all of this global turmoil. Our globe is in dire need of help, and the coronavirus reminds the world of what it means to work together. This pandemic marks a turning point in global efforts to slow down climate change. The methods we enact towards not only stopping the spread of the virus, but slowing down climate change, will ultimately depict how humanity will arise once this pandemic is suppressed. The future of our home planet lies in how we treat it right now. 

• “Climate Change: What Do All the Terms Mean?,” BBC News (BBC, May 1, 2019), https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48057733 )
• Ibid. 
• Kate Yoder, “Frank Luntz, the GOP's Message Master, Calls for Climate Action,” Grist (Grist, July 26, 2019), https://grist.org/article/the-gops-most-famous-messaging-strategist-calls-for-climate-action
• Melissa Denchak, “Paris Climate Agreement: Everything You Need to Know,” NRDC, April 29, 2020, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/paris-climate-agreement-everything-you-need-know)
• “Donald J. Trump's Foreign Policy Positions,” Council on Foreign Relations (Council on Foreign Relations), accessed May 7, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/election2020/candidate-tracker/donald-j.-trump?gclid=CjwKCAjw4871BRAjEiwAbxXi21cneTRft_doA5if60euC6QCL7sr-Jwwv76IkgWaUTuyJNx9EzZzRBoCdjsQAvD_BwE#climate and energy )
• David Doniger, “Paris Climate Agreement Explained: Does Congress Need to Sign Off?,” NRDC, December 15, 2016, https://www.nrdc.org/experts/david-doniger/paris-climate-agreement-explained-does-congress-need-sign )
• “How the UK Is Progressing,” Committee on Climate Change, March 9, 2020, https://www.theccc.org.uk/what-is-climate-change/reducing-carbon-emissions/how-the-uk-is-progressing/)
• Ibid.  
• “Top 10 Ways You Can Fight Climate Change,” Green America, accessed May 7, 2020, https://www.greenamerica.org/your-green-life/10-ways-you-can-fight-climate-change )
• Matt McGrath, “Climate Change and Coronavirus: Five Charts about the Biggest Carbon Crash,” BBC News (BBC, May 5, 2020), https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/science-environment-52485712 )

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Reflecting on Climate Change and Ecological Grief

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About this Mini-Lesson

Climate change is one of the defining issues of our time, and it can be emotionally challenging to discuss. This mini-lesson is designed to help students reflect on their emotional reactions to climate change, consider their connection to the natural world, and learn about how collective action against climate change can make a difference. You can use this mini-lesson to prepare students for further discussions on issues related to the impact of climate change on individuals or societies.

What's Included

This mini-lesson is designed to be adaptable. You can use the activities in sequence or choose a selection best suited to your classroom. It includes:

• 4 activities 
• Student-facing slides 
• Recommended articles for exploring this topic

Additional Context & Background

The climate crisis is causing shifts in the availability of resources and precipitating migration, which in turn impact human rights, national politics, and may increase conflict within and between countries. On a more local level, the climate crisis raises issues of justice. While every person is touched in some way by extreme weather events, flooding, or ecological loss, more vulnerable populations—who have contributed less to climate change—often bear the greatest burden. Examining the impacts of climate change with students is important, but it is also important to first help them process any feelings of helplessness, dread, or grief associated with this topic.

An increasing number of people—especially young people—are struggling with climate-related anxiety or “ecological grief,” a term used to describe feelings of loss and sadness caused by changes in the environment, the disruption of cultural practices and knowledge related to the natural world, and the anticipation of further losses as climate change progresses. 1

In a recent study, researchers interviewed 10,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 25 living in 10 different countries around the world. More than half of the respondents reported feeling “afraid, sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and/or guilty,” and 68% of respondents from the United States agreed that the “future is frightening” because of climate change. 2

• 1 Hannah Comtesse, Verena Ertl, Sophie M. C. Hengst et. al, “ Ecological Grief as a Response to Environmental Change: A Mental Health Risk or Functional Response? ,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health , January 2021; 18(2): 734.
• 2 Elizabeth Marks et. al, “ Young People's Voices on Climate Anxiety, Government Betrayal and Moral Injury: A Global Phenomenon ,” September 7, 2021.

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How Do You Feel When You Think About Climate Change

Depending on your students’ background knowledge, you may want to begin by sharing some general information about climate change, such as this short passage:

Climate change—caused by heat getting trapped in the earth’s atmosphere by greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide—is accelerating rapidly. While greenhouse gases have always been part of the atmosphere, climate scientists have established that their concentration has increased dramatically due to emissions from human activity. Journalist David Wallace-Wells writes in his book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming , “more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades.” 1 Most climate proposals aim to prevent the earth from warming more than either 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius above the average global temperature before industrialization. The average global temperature has already increased by around 1 degree Celsius, according to the IPCC. 2 The effect of this increase is already being felt in every region of the world through deadly heatwaves, desertification, decreased agricultural productivity, more extreme weather events, and rising sea levels. If humans do nothing to reduce emissions, we will be well over 2 degrees before the end of the century. Wallace-Wells writes that even a 2-degree rise in temperatures will have catastrophic consequences including increased water scarcity, coastal flooding, and extreme heat. 3  (To read more of Wallace-Wells’ reporting on climate change, see his  New York Magazine  article  The Uninhabitable Earth .) 

Ask students to reflect on the following prompt in their journals:

• How do you feel when you think about climate change?

Once students have finished journaling, ask them to share one word or phrase from their reflection with the class, either in a Word Cloud or by using the Wraparound strategy, where each student takes a turn sharing one word or phrase without an explanation.

Then, ask students:

• What patterns did you notice in the responses?
• Are there any words or phrases that stood out to you? Why?
• 1 David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019), 4.[/footnote] [footnote=4]: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Global Warming of 1.5°C” (Switzerland: IPCC, 2018).
• 2 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Global Warming of 1.5°C” (Switzerland: IPCC, 2018).
• 3 David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019).

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• Teaching Strategy Wraparound

How Do You Connect with the Natural World?

Ask your students to think of a place in nature. It can be somewhere they have been or a place that they imagine. Then, ask them to close their eyes and reflect on the following questions:

• What do you see in this place? What kind of plants or animals are there?
• What do you smell? 
• What sounds do you hear?
• How does your body feel when you imagine being in this place? What emotions do you feel?

Give students a few minutes to reflect on these questions. They can write, draw, or simply reflect as they consider these questions.

Then, ask students to read Returning the Gift  by Robin Wall Kimmerer, either individually or as a full class. When they’ve finished reading, ask students:

• Do you think people will change the way they act if they feel more gratitude towards nature? Why or why not?
• What could it look like to express gratitude toward the place you imagined at the beginning of this activity?
• Reading Returning the Gift

How Can Collective Action Make a Difference?

This activity uses a framework that legal scholar Martha Minow uses to analyze the ways in which people can make change. She observed that one of the biggest barriers that individuals face in getting involved is that it is hard to know what actual steps to take:

Often times we see something that's unjust and we wonder, “Where do I go? What do I do?” 1

To help individuals identify concrete actions to take when they “choose to participate,” Minow developed a “levers of power” framework to map out the organizations, institutions, and technologies that can enable us to strengthen the impact of our voices and our actions. The levers include:

• Government (National, State, Local)
• Nonprofit Organizations/Charities
• Industry/Commercial Organizations
• Professional Media
• Social Media/Internet
• Schools and Education
• Influential Individuals (Authors, Lecturers, etc.)

Briefly explain Martha Minow’s framework to your students. Share with them that many people feel paralyzed when they think about climate change because it is such a big issue, and it can feel like our individual actions will not make enough of a difference. Ask your students:

• Do you ever think about taking action on climate change or another issue that impacts your community?
• What obstacles do you think can make it difficult for you or other young people to act on issues that you care about?

For the rest of this activity, students will focus on three of the levers of power (government; nonprofit organizations; and schools and education) and think about how people can use these levers to make a difference on climate change. 

Divide your students into small groups, and assign each group one of the levers. Pass out copies of the reading Climate Change and Levers of Power  to each group. Ask your students to read the excerpt associated with their assigned lever and discuss the questions following the excerpt. ( Note: Instead of reading the suggested article, you can ask students to conduct their own research on their assigned lever.)

When students have finished reading about and discussing their lever of power, ask them to share what they learned with the class.

• 1 Martha Minow, "Martha Minow: Levers of Power" (video), Facing History and Ourselves.
• Reading Climate Change and Levers of Power

Final Reflection

Ask students to choose one of the following prompts to reflect on in their journals or an exit ticket :

• What is one question you have about what you learned today?
• What is an action that you could take to make a difference on climate change or on another issue you care about?
• Is your emotional reaction to climate change the same as it was when you wrote your first journal reflection? Why do you think it has either stayed the same or changed?
• Teaching Strategy Exit Tickets

Materials and Downloads

Explore the materials, student activities: reflecting on climate change and ecological grief, returning the gift, climate change and levers of power, you might also be interested in…, 10 questions for the future: student action project, the union as it was, radical reconstruction and the birth of civil rights, expanding democracy, voting rights in the united states, my part of the story: exploring identity in the united states, the struggle over women’s rights, equality for all, protesting discrimination in bristol, the hope and fragility of democracy in the united states, enacting freedom, understanding #takeaknee and athlete activism, unlimited access to learning. more added every month..

Facing History & Ourselves is designed for educators who want to help students explore identity, think critically, grow emotionally, act ethically, and participate in civic life. It’s hard work, so we’ve developed some go-to professional learning opportunities to help you along the way.

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Working for justice, equity and civic agency in our schools: a conversation with clint smith, centering student voices to build community and agency, inspiration, insights, & ways to get involved.

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1. Spread the word

Encourage your friends, family and co-workers to reduce their carbon pollution. Join a global movement like  Count Us In, which aims to inspire 1 billion people to take practical steps and challenge their leaders to act more boldly on climate. Organizers of the platform say that if 1 billion people took action, they could reduce as much as 20 per cent of global carbon emissions. Or you could sign up to the UN’s  #ActNow campaign on climate change and sustainability and add your voice to this critical global debate.

2. Keep up the political pressure

Lobby local politicians and businesses to support efforts to cut emissions and reduce carbon pollution.  #ActNow Speak Up  has sections on political pressure and corporate action - and Count Us In also has  some handy tips  for how to do this. Pick an environmental issue you care about, decide on a specific request for change and then try to arrange a meeting with your local representative. It might seem intimidating but your voice deserves to be heard. If humanity is to succeed in tackling the climate emergency, politicians must be part of the solution. It’s up to all of us to keep up with the pressure. 

3. Transform your transport

Transport accounts for around a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions and across the world, many governments are implementing policies to decarbonize travel. You can get a head start: leave your car at home and walk or cycle whenever possible. If the distances are too great, choose public transport, preferably electric options. If you must drive, offer to carpool with others so that fewer cars are on the road. Get ahead of the curve and buy an electric car. Reduce the number of long-haul flights you take. 

4. Rein in your power use

If you can, switch to a zero-carbon or renewable energy provider. Install solar panels on your roof. Be more efficient: turn your heating down a degree or two, if possible. Switch off appliances and lights when you are not using them and better yet buy the most efficient products in the first place (hint: this will save you money!). Insulate your loft or roof: you’ll be warmer in the winter, cooler in the summer and save some money too. 

5. Tweak your diet

Eat more plant-based meals – your body and the planet will thank you. Today, around 60 per cent of the world’s agricultural land is used for livestock grazing and people in many countries are consuming more animal-sourced food than is healthy. Plant-rich diets can help reduce chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer.

The climate emergency demands action from all of us. We need to get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and everyone has a role to play.

6. Shop local and buy sustainable

To reduce your food’s carbon footprint, buy local and seasonal foods. You’ll be helping small businesses and farms in your area and reducing fossil fuel emissions associated with transport and cold chain storage. Sustainable agriculture uses up to 56 per cent less energy, creates 64 per cent fewer emissions and allows for greater levels of biodiversity than conventional farming. Go one step further and try growing your own fruit, vegetables and herbs. You can plant them in a garden, on a balcony or even on a window sill. Set up a community garden in your neighbourhood to get others involved. 

7. Don’t waste food

One-third of all food produced is either lost or wasted. According to UNEP’s  Food Waste Index Report 2021 , people globally waste 1 billion tonnes of food each year, which accounts for around 8-10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Avoid waste by only buying what you need. Take advantage of every edible part of the foods you purchase. Measure portion sizes of rice and other staples before cooking them, store food correctly (use your freezer if you have one), be creative with leftovers, share extras with your friends and neighbours and contribute to a local food-sharing scheme. Make compost out of inedible remnants and use it to fertilize your garden. Composting is one of the best options for managing organic waste while also reducing environmental impacts.

8. Dress (climate) smart

The fashion industry accounts for 8-10 per cent of global carbon emissions – more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined – and ‘fast fashion’ has created a throwaway culture that sees clothes quickly end up in landfills. But we can change this. Buy fewer new clothes and wear them longer. Seek out sustainable labels and use rental services for special occasions rather than buying new items that will only be worn once. Recycle pre-loved clothes and repair when necessary.

9. Plant trees  

Every year approximately 12 million hectares of forest are destroyed and this deforestation, together with agriculture and other land use changes, is responsible for roughly 25 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. We can all play a part in reversing this trend by planting trees, either individually or as part of a collective. For example, the Plant-for-the-Planet initiative allows people to sponsor tree-planting around the world.

Check out this UNEP guide to see what else you can do as part of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration , a global drive to halt the degradation of land and oceans, protect biodiversity, and rebuild ecosystems. 

10. Focus on planet-friendly investments

Individuals can also spur change through their savings and investments by choosing financial institutions that do not invest in carbon-polluting industries. #ActNow Speak Up  has a section on money and so does  Count Us In . This sends a clear signal to the market and already many financial institutions are offering more ethical investments, allowing you to use your money to support causes you believe in and avoid those you don’t. You can ask your financial institution about their responsible banking policies and find out how they rank in independent research. 

UNEP is at the front in support of the Paris Agreement goal of keeping the global temperature rise well below 2°C, and aiming - to be safe - for 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels. To do this, UNEP has developed a Six-Sector Solution . The Six Sector Solution is a roadmap to reducing emissions across sectors in line with the Paris Agreement commitments and in pursuit of climate stability. The six sectors identified are Energy; Industry; Agriculture & Food; Forests & Land Use; Transport; and Buildings & Cities.

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Further Resources

• 7 climate action highlights to remember before COP26
• Climate Action Note - data you need to know
• Emissions Gap Report 2021
• Food Waste Index 2021
• Act Now: the UN campaign for individual action
• Count Us In
• Food Loss and Waste Website

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Friday essay: thinking like a planet - environmental crisis and the humanities

Emeritus Professor of History, Australian National University

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Tom Griffiths does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Australian National University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Many of us joined the Global Climate Strike on Friday, 20 September, and together we constituted half a million Australians gathering peacefully and walking the streets of our cities and towns to protest at government inaction in the face of the gravest threat human civilisation has faced.

It was a global strike, but its Australian manifestation had a particular twist, for our own federal government is an international pariah on this issue. We have become the Ugly Australians, led by brazen climate deniers who trash the science and snub the UN Climate Summit.

Government politicians in Canberra constantly tell us the Great Barrier Reef is fine, coal is good for humanity, Pacific islands are floating not being flooded, wind turbines are obscene, power blackouts are due to renewables, “drought-proofing” is urgent but “climate-change” has nothing to do with it, science is a conspiracy, climate protesters are a “scourge” who deserve to be punished and jailed, the ABC spins the weather, the Bureau of Meteorology requires a royal commission, the United Nations is a bully, if we have to have emissions targets, well, we are exceeding them, and Australia is so insignificant in the world it doesn’t have to act anyway.

It’s a wilful barrage of lies, an insult to the public, a threat to civil society, and an extraordinary attack on our intelligence by our own elected representatives.

The international Schools4Climate movement is remarkable because it is led by children, teenagers still at school advocating a future they hope to have. I can’t think of another popular protest movement in world history led by children. This could be a transformative moment in global politics; it certainly needs to be. The active presence of so many engaged children gave the rally a spirit and a lightness in spite of its grim subject; there was a sense of fun, a family feeling about the occasion, but there was a steely resolve too.

A girl in a school uniform standing next to me at the rally held a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 in her hands. Many of the people around me would normally expect to see in the 22nd century. Their power, paradoxically, is they are not voters. They didn’t elect this government! They are protesting not just against the governments of the world but also against us adults, who did elect these politicians or who abide them. There was a moment at the rally when, with the mysterious organic coherence crowds possess, the older protesters stepped aside, parting like a wave, and formed a guard of honour through the centre of which the children marched holding their placards, their leadership acknowledged.

Read more: Guide to the classics: Orwell's 1984 and how it helps us understand tyrannical power today

One placard declared: “You’ll die of old age; I’ll die of climate change”; another said: “If Earth were cool, I’d be in school.” One held up a large School Report Card with subject results: “Ethics X, Responsibility X, Climate Action X. Needs to try harder.” Another explained: “You skip summits, we skip school.”

In Melbourne, as elsewhere, teenagers gave the speeches; and they were passionate and eloquent. The demands of the movement are threefold: no new coal, oil and gas projects; 100% renewable energy generation and exports by 2030; and fund a just transition and job creation for all fossil-fuel workers and communities. There were also Indigenous speakers. One declared: “We stand for you too, when we stand for Country.”

There were 150,000 people in the Melbourne Treasury Gardens, a crowd so large responsive cheers rippled like a Mexican wave up the hill from the speakers. I reflected on the historical parallels for what was unfolding, recalling the Vietnam moratorium demonstrations and the marches against the first Gulf War, the Freedom Rides and the civil rights movement, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the suffragettes’ campaigns.

Inspired by this history, we now have the Extinction Rebellion , a movement born in a small British town late last year which declares “only non-violent rebellion can now stop climate breakdown and social collapse”. Within six months, through civil disobedience, it brought central London to a standstill and the United Kingdom became the first country to declare a climate emergency. We are at a political tipping point.

In Australia, the result of this year’s election tells us there is no accountability for probably the most dysfunctional and discredited federal government in our history, and now we are left with a parliament unwilling to act on so many vital national and international issues. The 2019 federal election was no status quo outcome, as some political commentators have declared. Rather, it was a radical result, revealing deep structural flaws in our parliamentary democracy, our media culture and our political discourse. For me it ranks with two other elections in my voting lifetime: the “dark victory” of the 2001 Tampa election , and the 1975 constitutional crisis . Like those earlier dates, 2019 could shape and shadow a generation. It is time to get out on the streets again.

Skolstrejk för klimatet

The founder, symbol and the voice of the School Strike movement is, of course, Greta Thunberg. It is just over a year since August 2018 when she began to spend every Friday away from class sitting outside the Swedish parliament with a handmade sign declaring “School Strike for the Climate”.

When she told her parents about her plans, she reported “they weren’t very fond of it”. Addressing the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2018, she said : “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children.” Thunberg quietly invokes the carbon budget and the galling fact there is already so much carbon in the system “there is simply not enough time to wait for us to grow up and become the ones in charge.”

In late September, Thunberg gave a powerful presentation at the UN Climate Summit; Richard Flanagan compared her 495-word UN speech to Abraham Lincoln’s 273-word Gettysburg Address. It’s a reasonable parallel that reaches for some understanding of the enormity of this political moment.

It is sickening to see the speed with which privileged old white men have rushed to pour bile on this young woman. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin quickly recognised her power and sought to neutralise and patronise her. Scott Morrison chimed in. Australia’s locker room of shock jocks laced the criticism with some misogyny. It’s amazing how they froth at the mouth about a calm and articulate schoolgirl. They are all – directly or indirectly – in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.

Read more: Misogyny, male rage and the words men use to describe Greta Thunberg

Denialism is worthy of study . I don’t mean the conscious and fraudulent denialism of politicians and shock-jocks such as those I’ve mentioned. That’s pretty simple stuff – lies motivated by opportunism, greed and personal advancement, and funded by the carbon-polluting industries. It is appalling but boring.

There are more interesting forms of denialism, such as the emotional denialism we all inhabit. Emotional denialism in the face of the unthinkable can take many forms – avoidance, hope, anxiety, even a kind of torpor when people truly begin to understand what will happen to the world of their grandchildren. We are all prone to this willing blindness and comforting self-delusion. Overcoming that is our greatest challenge.

And there is a third kind of denialism that should especially interest scholars. It is when some of our own kind – scholars trained to respect evidence – fashion themselves as sceptics, but are actually dogged contrarians.

Read more: There are three types of climate change denier, and most of us are at least one

One example is Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian and professor of history at Harvard University, who calls climate science “science fiction” and recently joined the ranks of old, white, privileged men commenting on the appearance of Greta Thunberg. I’m not arguing here with Ferguson’s politics – he is an arch-conservative and I do disagree with his politics, but I also believe engaged, reflective politics can drive good history.

Rather, Ferguson’s disregard for evidence and neglect of science and scholarship attracts my attention. His understanding of climate science and climate history is poor: in a recent article in the Boston Globe he assumed the Little Ice Age started in the 17th century, whereas its beginning was three centuries earlier .

How does a trained scholar, a professor of history, get themselves in this ignominious position? For Ferguson, contrarianism has been a productive intellectual strategy – going against the flow of fashion is a good scholarly instinct – but on climate change his politics and the truth have steadily travelled in different directions and caught him out. We can say the same of Geoffrey Blainey, another successful contrarian who has cornered himself on climate change . Like Ferguson he appears uninterested in decades of significant research in environmental history – and thus his healthy scepticism has morphed into foolish denialism.

Denialism matters because all kinds of it have delayed our global political response to climate change by 30 years. In those critical decades since the 1980s, when humans first understood the urgency of the climate crisis, total historical carbon emissions since the industrial revolution have doubled . And still global emissions are rising, every year.

The physics of this process are inexorable – and so simple, as Greta would say, even a child can understand. We are already committing ourselves to two degrees of warming, possibly three or four. Denialists have, knowingly and with malice aforethought, condemned future generations to what Tim Flannery calls a “grim winnowing”. Flannery wrote recently “the climate crisis has now grown so severe that the actions of the denialists have turned predatory: they are now an immediate threat to our children.”

Read more: The gloves are off: 'predatory' climate deniers are a threat to our children

The history of denialism alerts us to a disastrous paradox: the very moment, in the 1980s, when it became clear global warming was a collective predicament of humanity, we turned away politically from the idea of the collective, with dire consequences. Naomi Klein, in her latest book On Fire , elucidates this fateful coincidence, which she calls “an epic case of historical bad timing”: just as the urgency of action on climate change became apparent, “the global neoliberal revolution went supernova”.

Unfettered free-market fanaticism and its relentless attack on the public sphere derailed the momentum building for corporate regulation and global cooperation. Ten years ago, thoughtful, informed climate activists could still argue that we can decouple the debates about economy and democracy from climate action. But now we can’t. At the 2019 election, Australia may have missed its last chance for incremental political change. If the far right had not politicised climate change and delayed action for so long then radical political transformation would not necessarily have been required. But now it will be, and it’s coming.

A great derangement

We are indeed living in what we might call “uncanny times”. They are weird, strange and unsettling in ways that question nature and culture and even the possibility of distinguishing between them.

The Bengali novelist Amitav Ghosh uses the term “uncanny” in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable , published in 2016. The planet is alive, says Ghosh, and only for the last three centuries have we forgotten that. We have been suffering from “the great derangement”, a disturbing condition of wilful and systematic blindness to the consequences of our own actions, in which we are knowingly killing the planetary systems that support the survival of our species. That’s what’s uncanny about our times: we are half-aware of this predicament yet also paralysed by it, caught between horror and hubris.

We inhabit a critical moment in the history of the Earth and of life on this planet, and a most unusual one in terms of our own human history. We have developed two powerful metaphors for making sense of it. One is the idea of the Anthropocene , which is the insight we have entered a new geological epoch in the history of the Earth and have now left behind the 13,000 years of the relatively stable Holocene epoch, the period since the last great ice age. The new epoch recognises the power of humans in changing the nature of the planet, putting us on a par with other geophysical forces such as variations in the earth’s orbit, glaciers, volcanoes and asteroid strikes.

The other potent metaphor for this moment in Earth history is the Sixth Extinction . Humans have wiped out about two-thirds of the world’s wildlife in just the last half-century.

Let that sentence sink in. It has happened in less than a human lifetime. The current extinction rate is a hundred to a thousand times higher than was normal in nature. There have been other such catastrophic collapses in the diversity of life on Earth: five of them – sudden, shocking falls in the graph of biodiversity separated by tens of millions of years, the last one in the immediate aftermath of the asteroid impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. We now have to ask ourselves: are we inhabiting – and causing – the Sixth Extinction?

These two metaphors – the Anthropocene and the Sixth Extinction – are both historical concepts that require us to travel in geological and biological time across hundreds of millions of years and then to arrive back at the present with a sense not of continuity but of discontinuity, of profound rupture. That’s what Earth system science has revealed: it’s now too late to go back to the Holocene. We’ve irrevocably changed the Earth system and unwittingly steered the planet into the Anthropocene; now we can’t take our hand off the tiller.

Earth is alive

I’ve been considering metaphors of deep time, but what of deep space? It has also enlarged our imaginations in the last half century. In July this year, we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing. I was 12 at the time of the Apollo 11 voyage and found myself in a school debate about whether the money for the Moon mission would be better spent on Earth. I argued it would be, and my team lost.

But what other result was allowable in July 1969? Conquering the Moon, declared Dr Wernher von Braun, Nazi scientist turned US rocket maestro, assured man of immortality . I followed the Apollo missions with a sense of wonder, staying up late to watch the Saturn V launch, joining my schoolmates in a large hall with tiny televisions to witness Armstrong take his Giant Leap, and saving full editions of The Age newspaper reporting those fabled days.

The rhetoric of space exploration was so future-oriented that NASA did not foresee Apollo’s greatest legacy: the radical effect of seeing the Earth. In 1968, the historic Apollo 8 mission launched humans beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time, into the gravitational power of another heavenly body. For three lunar orbits, the three astronauts studied the strange, desolate, cratered surface below them and then, as they came out from the dark side of the Moon for the fourth time, they looked up and gasped :

Frank Borman: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that is pretty! Bill Anders: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.

They did take the unscheduled photo, excitedly, and it became famous, perhaps the most famous photograph of the 20th century, the blue planet floating alone, finite and vulnerable in space above a dead lunar landscape. Bill Anders declared : “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

In his fascinating book, Earthrise (2010), British historian Robert Poole explains this was not supposed to happen. The cutting edge of the future was to be in space. Leaving the Earth’s atmosphere was seen as a stage in human evolution comparable to our amphibian ancestor crawling out of the primeval slime onto land.

Furthermore, this new dominion was seen to offer what Neil Armstrong called a “survival possibility” for a world shadowed by the nuclear arms race. In the words of Buzz Lightyear (who is sometimes hilariously confused with Buzz Aldrin), the space age looked to infinity and beyond!

Earthrise had a profound impact on environmental politics and sensibilities. Within a few years, the American scientist James Lovelock put forward “ the Gaia hypothesis ”: that the Earth is a single, self-regulating organism. In the year of the Apollo 8 mission, Paul Ehrlich published his book, The Population Bomb , an urgent appraisal of a finite Earth. British economist Barbara Ward wrote Spaceship Earth and Only One Earth , revealing how economics failed to account for environmental damage and degradation, and arguing that exponential growth could not continue forever.

Earth Day was established in 1970, a day to honour the planet as a whole, a total environment needing protection. In 1972, the Club of Rome released its controversial and influential report The Limits to Growth , which sold over 13 million copies. In their report, Donella Meadows and Dennis Meadows wrestled with the contradiction of trying to force infinite material growth on a finite planet. The cover of their book depicted a whole Earth, a shrinking Earth.

Earth systems science developed in the second half of the 20th century and fostered a keen understanding of planetary boundaries – thresholds in planetary ecology - and the extent to which they were being violated. The same industrial capitalism that unleashed carbon enabled us to extract ice cores from the poles and construct a deep history of the air. The fossil fuels that got humans to the Moon, it now emerged, were endangering our civilisation.

The American ecologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in 1949 of the need for a new “land ethic” . Leopold envisaged a gradual historical expansion of human ethics, from the relations between individuals to those between the individual and society, and ultimately to those between humans and the land. He hoped for an enlargement of the community to which we imagine ourselves belonging, one that includes soil, water, plants and animals.

In his book of essays, A Sand County Almanac , there is a short, profound reflection called “Thinking like a mountain.” He tells of going on the mountain and shooting a wolf and her cubs and then watching “a fierce green fire” die in her eyes.

He shot her because he thought fewer wolves meant more deer, but over the years he watched the overpopulated deer herd die as the wolfless mountain became a dustbowl. Leopold came to understand the beautiful delicacy of the ecosystem, which holds “a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.”

Today, 70 years after Leopold’s philosophical leap, we are being challenged to scale up from a land ethic to an earth ethic, to an environmental vision and philosophy of action that sees the planet as an integrated whole and all of life upon it as an interdependent historical community with a common destiny, to think not only like a mountain, but also like a planet. We are belatedly remembering the planet is alive.

Climate science is climate history

Climate change and ecological crisis are often seen as purely scientific issues. But as humanities scholars we know all environmental problems are at heart human ones; “scientific” issues are pre-eminently challenges for the humanities. Historical perspective can offer much in this time of ecological crisis, and many historians are reinventing their traditional scales of space and time to tell different kinds of stories, ones that recognise the agency of other creatures and the unruly power of nature.

There is a tendency among denialists to lazily use history against climate science, arguing for example “the climate’s always changing”, or “this has happened before”. Good recent historical scholarship about the last 2000 years of human civilisation is so important because it corrects these misunderstandings. That’s why it’s so disappointing when celebrity historians like Niall Ferguson and Geoffrey Blainey seek to represent their discipline by ignoring the work of their colleagues.

Climate science is unavoidably climate history; it’s an empirical, historical interpretation of life on earth, full of new insights into the impact and predicament of humanity in the long and short term. Recent histories of the last 2,000 years have been crucial in helping us to appreciate the fragile relationship between climate and society, and why future average temperature changes of more than 2°C can have dire consequences for human civilisation.

We now have environmental histories of antiquity, and of medieval and early modern Europe – studies casting new light on familiar human dramas, including the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Death in the medieval period, and the unholy trinity of famine, war and disease during the Little Ice Age of the 17th century.

These books draw on natural as well as human history, on the archives of ice, air and sediment as well as bones, artefacts and documents. And then there is John McNeill’s history of the 20th century, Something New Under the Sun , which argues “the human race, without intending anything of the sort, has undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on earth”.

These new histories encompass the planet and the human species, and provocatively blur biological evolution and cultural history (Yuval Noah Harari’s “brief history of humankind”, Sapiens , is a bestselling example). They investigate the vast elemental nature of the heavens as well as the interior, microbial nature of human bodies: nature inside and out, with the striving human as a porous vessel for its agency.

In Australia, we have outstanding new histories linking geological and human time, such as Charles Massy’s Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth and Tony Hughes d’Aeth’s Like Nothing on This Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt .

Australians seem predisposed to navigate the Anthropocene. I think it’s because the challenge of Australian history in the 21st century is how to negotiate the rupture of 1788, how to relate geological and human scales, how to get our heads and hearts around a colonial history of 200 years that plays out across a vast Indigenous history in deep time.

From the beginnings of colonisation, Australia’s new arrivals commonly alleged Aboriginal people had no history, had been here no more than a few thousand years, and were caught in the fatal thrall of a continental museum. But from the early 1960s, archaeologists confirmed what Aboriginal people had always known: Australia’s human history went back aeons, into the Pleistocene, well into the last ice age. In the late 20th century, the timescale of Australia’s human history increased tenfold in just 30 years and the journey to the other side of the frontier became a journey back into deep time.

Read more: Friday essay: when did Australia’s human history begin?

It’s no wonder the idea of big history was born here, or environmental history has been so innovative here. This is a land of a radically different ecology, where climatic variation and uncertainty have long been the norm – and are now intensifying. Australia’s long human history spans great climatic change and also offers a parable of cultural resilience.

Even the best northern-hemisphere scholars struggle to digest the implications of the Australian time revolution. They often assume, for example, “civilisation” is a term associated only with agriculture, and still insist 50,000 years is a possible horizon for modern humanity. Australia offers a distinctive and remarkable human saga for a world trying to come to terms with climate change and the rupture of the Anthropocene. Living on a precipice of deep time has become, I think, an exhilarating dimension of what it means to be Australian. Our nation’s obligation to honour the Uluru Statement is not just political; it is also metaphysical. It respects another ethical practice and another way of knowing.

Earthspeaking

In 2003, in its second issue, Griffith Review put the land at the centre of the nation. The edition was called Dreams of Land and it’s full of gold, including an essay by Ian Lowe sounding the alarm on the ecological and climate emergency – which reminds us how long we’ve had these eloquent warnings. As Graeme Davison said on launching the edition in December 2003:

At the threshold of the 21st century Australia has suddenly come down to earth. […] Earth, water, wind and fire are not just natural elements; they are increasingly the great issues of the day.

It is instructive to compare this issue of the Griffith Review, with the edition entitled Writing the Country , published 15 years later last summer. In the intervening decade and a half, sustainability morphed into survival, native title into Treaty and the Voice, the Anthropocene infiltrated our common vocabulary, the republic and Aboriginal recognition are no longer separable, and land decisively became Country with a capital “C”. In 2003 the reform hopes of the 1990s had not entirely died, but by 2019 it’s clear the dead hand of the Howard government and its successors has thoroughly throttled trust in the workings of the state.

Perhaps the most powerful contribution in GR2 – and it was given the honour of appearing first – was an essay by Melissa Lucashenko called “Not quite white in the head”. This year’s Miles Franklin winner, Lucashenko was already in great form in 2003. Tough, poetic and confronting, the words of her essay still resonate. Lucashenko writes of “earthspeaking”.

“I am earthspeaking,” she says, “talking about this place, my home and it is first, a very small story […] This earthspeaking is a small, quiet story in a human mouth.”

“Big stories are failing us as a nation,” suggests Lucashenko. “But we are citizens and inheritors and custodians of tiny landscapes too. It is the small stories that attach to these places […] which might help us find a way through.”

I think earthspeaking is a companion to thinking like a planet. Instead of beginning from the outside with a view of Earth in deep space and deep time, earthspeaking works from the ground up; it is inside-out; it begins with beloved Country. So it is with earthspeaking I want to finish.

Four months ago I was privileged to sit in a circle with Mithaka people, the traditional Aboriginal owners of 33,000 square kilometres of the Kirrenderi/Channel Country of the Lake Eyre Basin in south-western Queensland. In 2015, the Federal Court handed down a native title consent determination for the Mithaka enabling them to return to Country. Now they have begun a process of assessing and renewing their knowledge.

I was invited to be involved because I have studied the major white writer about this region, a woman called Alice Duncan-Kemp who was born on this land in 1901 where her family ran a cattle farm, and grew up with Mithaka people who worked on the station and were her carers and teachers. Young Alice spent her childhood days with her Aboriginal friends and teachers, especially Mary Ann and Moses Youlpee, who took her on walks and taught her the names and meanings and stories that connected every tree, bird, plant, animal, rock, dune and channel.

From the 1930s to the 1960s Alice wrote four books – half a million words – about the world of her childhood and the people and nature of the Channel Country, and although she did find a wide readership, her books were dismissed by authorities, landowners and locals as “romantic” and “nostalgic” and “fictional”.

Her writing was systematically marginalised: she was a woman in cattle country, a sympathiser with Aboriginal people, she refused to ignore the violence of the frontier and she challenged the typical heroic western style of narrative. The huge Kidman pastoral company bought her family’s land in 1998, bulldozed the historic pisé homestead into the creek, threw out the collection of Aboriginal artefacts, and continues to deny Alice’s writings have any historical authenticity. Yet her books were respected in the native title process and were crucial to the Mithaka in their fight to regain access to Country.

It was very moving to be present this year when Alice’s descendants and Moses’ people met for the first time. It was not just a social and symbolic occasion: we had come together as researchers and we had work to do. Across a weekend we pored over maps and talked through evidence, combining legend, memory, oral history, letters and manuscripts, published books, archaeological studies, surveyors’ records, and even recent drone footage of the remote terrain, all with the purpose of retrieving and reactivating knowledge, recovering language and reanimating Country. We could literally map Alice’s stories back onto features of the land, with the aim of bringing it under caring attention again.

This process is going on in beloved places right across the continent. Grace Karskens and Kim Mahood write beautifully in GR63 about similar quests, and of their hope written words dredged from the archive “might again be spoken as part of living language and shared geographies.”

Earthspeaking and thinking like a planet are profoundly linked. As the Indigenous speaker at the Melbourne Climate Strike said, “We stand for you when we stand for Country.” In these frightening and challenging times, we need radical storytelling and scholarly histories, narratives that weave together humans and nature, history and natural history, that move from Earth systems to the earth beneath our feet, from the lonely, living planet spinning through space to the intimately known and beloved local worlds over which we might, if we are lucky, exert some benevolent influence.

We need them not only because they help us to better understand our predicament, but also because they might enable us to act, with intelligence and grace.

This essay was adapted from the Showcase Lecture, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University, Queensland, Wednesday, 9 October 2019

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Steps To Follow While Writing An Essay On Climate Change

Table of Contents

Climate change is the most essential issue of our generation; we are the first to witness its early signs and the last who have a chance of stopping them from happening.

Living in a bubble of denial can only get us this far; the planet which is our home is already a scene for melting glaciers, raising floods, extinction of species… the list goes on and on. Spreading awareness on matters of climate change through any means available, including as seemingly trivial form as writing a school essay, cannot be underestimated.

Follow the guidelines suggested in the paragraphs below to learn how to create a perfect essay that will get you an appraisal of your teacher.

Essay on climate changes: how to write?

If you really want to make your teacher gasp while they are reading your work, there are three vital things to pay attention to .

First of all, read the topic carefully and understand it’s specific, i.e., what is expected from you.

For instance, if it is the role of individuals in helping prevent climate change, you should not focus so much on the global problems, but speak about how small changes all of us can introduce in our routines will eventually have a positive environmental effect.

Secondly, determine your personal take on the problem . Search for materials on your subject using keywords, and pile up the evidence that supports your point of view.

Finally, write a conclusion. Make sure that the conclusion you make reflects the viewpoints you have been expressing all throughout your essay.

Below you will find a more detailed breakdown of tasks you will have to accomplish to complete writing an essay on climate changes that is worthy of a top mark.

Check if it is an argumentative essay on climate change or more of a speculative one? Arrange your writing accordingly.

• Craft the outline and don’t go off-topic.
• Search for keywords .
• Make a plan .
• Avoid the most common mistakes from the start.
• Write an introduction thinking about what you will write later.
• Develop your ideas according to the outline .
• Make a conclusion which is consistent with what you’ve written in the main paragraphs.
• Proofread the draft , correct mistakes and print out the hard copy. All set!

One of the most focal of your writing will be factual evidence. When writing on climate change, resort to providing data shared by international organizations like IPCC , WWF , or World Bank .

It is undeniable that among the main causes of climate change, unfortunately, there are oil and fossil fuels that are the basis of the whole economy and still invaluable sources of energy.

Although everyone knows that oil resources are polluting and that it would be much more useful and environmentally sustainable to rely on renewable energies such as wind and solar energies and electricity, the power of the world seem not to notice or pretend not to see for don’t go against your own interests.

The time has come to react and raise awareness of the use of renewable energy sources.

In addition to the causes already mentioned, we must consider the increase in the carbon dioxide air that traps heat in our atmosphere, thus increasing the temperatures with the consequent of the Arctic glaciers melting.

WWF reported that in 2016, the recorded data was quite worrying with a constant increase in temperatures and a 40% decrease in Arctic marine glaciers.

Topics for essay on global warming and climate change

If you do not have any specific topic to write on, consider yourself lucky. You can pick one that you are passionate about – and in fact, this is what you should do! If we think back to the very definition of essay, it is nothing more than a few paragraphs of expressing one’s personal attitude and viewpoints on a certain subject. Surely, you need to pick a subject that you are opinionated about to deliver a readable piece of writing!

Another point to consider is quaintness and topicality factors. You don’t want to end up writing on a subject that the rest of your class will, and in all honesty, that has zero novelty to it.

Even if it is something as trivial as the greenhouse effect, add an unexpected perspective to it: the greenhouse effect from the standpoint of the feline population of Montenegro. Sounds lunatic, but you get the drift.

Do not worry, below you will find the list of legitimately coverable topics to choose from:

• The last generation able to fight the global crisis.
• Climate change: top 10 unexpected causes.
• Climate changes. Things anyone can do.
• Climate changes concern everyone. Is it true?
• The Mauna Loa volcano: climate change is here.
• Water pollution and coastal cities: what needs to be done?
• Is there global warming if it’s still cold?
• The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
• Celebrity activists and climate changes.
• Individual responsibility for the environment.
• How the loss of biodiversity is the biggest loss for humanity.
• Ways to fight global warming at home.
• Sustainable living as a way of fighting climate change.
• Climate change fighting countries to look up to.
• Industrial responsibility and climate change.
• What future will be like if we fail to make an environmental stand?
• Discovering water on Mars: a new planet to live on?
• Climate change effects on poor countries.
• Nuclear power laws and climate change.
• Is it true that climate change is caused by man?

Mistakes to avoid when writing an essay on climate change

When composing your essay, you must avoid the following (quite common!) mistakes:

• Clichés – no one wants to read universal truths presented as relevant discoveries.
• Repeating an idea already expressed – don’t waste your readers’ time .
• Making an accumulation of ideas that are not connected and that do not follow one another; structure your ideas logically .
• Being contradictive (check consistency).
• Using bad or tired collocations .
• Using lackluster adjectives like “good”/”bad”. Instead, think of more eye-catching synonyms.

Structure your essay in a logical way : introduce your thesis, develop your ideas in at least 2 parts that contain several paragraphs, and draw a conclusion.

Bottom line

Writing an essay on global warming and climate change is essentially reflecting on the inevitable consequence of the irresponsible behavior of people inhabiting the planet. Outside of big-scale thinking, there is something each of us can do, and by shaping minds the right way, essential change can be done daily.

Each of us can act to protect the environment, reducing the use of plastic, recycling, buying food with as little packaging as possible, or turning off water and light when not in use. Every little help, even a short essay on climate change can help make a difference.

Can’t wait to save the planet? Do it, while we write your essay. Easy order, complete confidentiality, timely delivery. Click the button to learn more!

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Perspectives

Five Reflections on the IPCC Climate Change Report

October 24, 2018

By Justin Adams, Executive Director, Tropical Forest Alliance

In response to last week’s release of the UN’s IPCC report on the climate, which warned that “unprecedented” changes were needed to slow or stop global warming beyond 1.5C pre-industrial period, it’s easy judging by the headlines and subsequent global response to perhaps give up or sink into despair. “Terrifying.” “Time to Wake Up.” “Final Call”. “Ten years to Act ” were just some of the headlines. Could this report, as shocking as it is, actually be the much-needed catalyst for action we’ve all been waiting for? Letting the dust settle a little on this powerful series of findings endorsed by all the world’s governments, these are my top five reflections. 

Could this report actually be the much-needed catalyst for action we’ve all been waiting for?

1. We now have a better understanding that every fraction of a degree counts

The report shows that every fraction of a degree of warming matters. Continued rising temperatures will exact a huge toll on people, natural ecosystems and the economy. The IPCC concludes the world will likely reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels as soon as 2030. It notes that 20-40 percent of the global population lives in regions that have already experienced warming of more than 1.5°C in at least one season.

The primary way to limit warming to less than 1.5°C is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—and eventually reach net-zero emissions. According to the report, to limit warming to 1.5°C with “no or limited overshoot,” net global CO 2 emissions need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net zero by around 2050.  

The report puts it this way: “By 2100, global sea-level rise would be 10 cm lower with global warming of 1.5°C compared with 2°C. The likelihood of an Arctic Ocean free of sea ice in summer would be once per century with global warming of 1.5°C, compared with at least once per decade with 2°C. Coral reefs would decline by 70-90 percent with global warming of 1.5°C, whereas virtually all would be lost with 2°C.”

However, here is the kicker. Even with the pledged emission cuts under the Paris Agreement, the world is nowhere near achieving the volume of necessary cuts. To do so, we would need “rapid and far-reaching transitions” across the entire global economy, including changes in the way we source and use energy, how we use land and grow food, and what types and quantities of food and materials we consume. 

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2.   We have a better understanding of deep mitigation pathways—and nature is the ‘forgotten solution’ we need to reach 1.5°C

A series of reports that qualify and quantify the power of nature as a climate solution have also been released. The CLARA Alliance just released  its report , suggesting that shifting from industrial crop and livestock production toward more ecological methods would make a major contribution towards reducing emissions, while also feeding people fairly and empowering the world’s smallholder farmers, particularly women. It points out that the 1.5 degree goal can be met without relying on planetary-scale land-use change like BECCS (Bioenergy with Carbon Capture Storage) for carbon removal.

Further huge emissions savings can be made if sections of society that enjoy high levels of meat consumption shifted to consuming fewer animal products, and to a more plant-based flexitarian diet.  A “less and better” approach to food production would go a long way toward cutting emissions, the report says, while still feeding the world fairly. Taken together, ecosystem-based approaches and transformative changes in land and agriculture sectors could deliver 11 Gt CO2-eq per year in avoided emissions, and a further 10 Gt CO2-eq per year in carbon sequestered into the biosphere by 2050.

Furthermore, a study by  The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and a group of other organizations  published last year found that natural climate solutions like these could deliver a third of the required mitigation by 2030 to restrict global warming to 2 degrees. The key is that these natural solutions are affordable, actionable and scalable  today . They do not involve technologies still under development with unknown costs. A forthcoming assessment on land use in the USA is also expected to show enormous potential. 

3. It’s one system

Protecting and increasing tropical forest cover is vital, since these regions cool the air and are key to generating regional rainfall that supports food production. Yet commodities like beef, soy, timber and palm oil are currently responsible for over half of tropical forest loss. What we eat and use matters. Soil leads the way as a carbon sink and is among the cheapest methods with the greatest potential. The IPCC found that by 2050, soil carbon sequestration could remove between two and five gigatons of CO2 a year , at a cost ranging from less than $0 to $100 per ton. It also helps us grow our food.

4. Action and money are needed now

We need to talk about how to shift capital. As mentioned above, one reading of scenarios presented in the report to stay below 1.5 C of warming shows that we only have until around 2030 to achieve net-zero emissions globally. That's essentially tomorrow when we're talking about the pace of change required in a complex, dynamic systems like energy, food and financial markets.

Most organizations  working along and together  now recognize that to stop or slow global warming, we will have to increase current levels of ambition. Natural climate solutions, which have long been overlooked by the international community, will have to play a much bigger role. In effect that means governments and companies must set specific targets for natural climate solutions in their commitments under Paris.

It also means a ramp-up in finance: right now, the land sector only receives around 3% of public climate funding. That will have to be targeted to leverage the scale of the private sector if the transition on land is to be successful.

5. This is no longer just an ‘environmental story’

Time’s up. It's time to take action now or pay for it later – indeed, not much later if current climate trends are any indication. To get to 2 degrees Celsius or under, all these solutions require unprecedented efforts to cut fossil-fuel use in half in less than 15 years and eliminate their use almost entirely within 30 years. Long siloed, the conversation at least this month took on a new urgency. Climate change is no longer just a political story. The science is clear, the impacts too obvious, the potentially irreversible repercussions as well as deployable solutions imminent. Now it's a business story, a legal story and, increasingly, a story about the potential contribution of both technology and nature working alongside each other.

The good news is that the future hasn’t already been set in stone. Climate change is an inescapable present and future reality, but the point of the IPCC report is that there is still a chance to seize the best-case scenario rather than surrender to the worst. This December, Poland hosts the next UN governmental meeting, and the UN Secretary General has asked global leaders to meet with him at a special summit in New York in September next year, citing alarm by the paralysis of world leaders on what he called the "defining issue" of our time. Grave threat, or unmissable opportunity for movement and funding? There is still time to decide, although the window is narrowing rapidly. 

Originally Posted on  Nature4Climate October 17, 2018 View Original

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Emotional Appeal: How Art Can Inspire Action on Climate Change

Earth Institute

In honor of Earth Day on April 22, the Earth Institute has a variety of great stories and events lined up for you throughout the entire month of April. Learn more .

It was on a trip to Greenland that artist Zaria Forman first grasped the urgency of the climate crisis. She was traveling with her family and, having never been to a polar region before, planned to use the landscape as inspiration for her work. The hotel they were staying at was bustling, not with tourists, but with government officials, newscasters, and scientists — all there to study the Greenland ice sheet. In 2007, most media outlets in the United States weren’t covering climate change. But in the Arctic, a then- record 552 billion tons of ice was melting — the equivalent of eight Olympic swimming pools draining into the ocean every second.

Forman remembers speaking with the scientists over dinner about what they were seeing. “It really clicked for me,” she said. “Climate change is one of the largest crises we face as a global society, and there wasn’t a question in my mind that it was what I needed to focus on.”

Forman is part of a growing movement of artists using their work to address and convey the magnitude of the climate crisis. Earlier this month, she and several others participated in two panel events hosted by the Earth Institute and Mana Contemporary on how art and science can work together as a vehicle for climate action.

Artists as Witnesses

The work of these artists, not unlike science itself, takes root in the careful observation of the natural world. “When you draw something, you are forced to examine and re-examine it very closely,” said James Prosek , whose documentation of fish species has taken him from the base of California’s Mount Whitney to the headwaters of the Euphrates River in Turkey. Much of Prosek’s work explores the artificial boundaries that people have constructed to define nature — not only by drawing geographic borders, but also by relying on conventions like taxonomy.

“Nature is this interconnected, constantly changing system,” said Prosek, “but in order to communicate it, we have to reduce it. We draw lines between things and label them as pieces.” He explained that while the reduction of nature is a critical part of building knowledge — calling a Gila trout a Gila trout helps differentiate it from an Apache trout — it also creates a tendency for people to lose sight of the larger whole, especially in the face of universal threats like climate change.

Art offers a way to challenge that tendency, in part by sharing other representations of the natural world. “My work has always been about giving viewers a chance to experience a place they might not have the chance to visit,” said Forman. Her pastel drawings — so detailed that they are often mistaken for photographs — are like windows cut into the gallery walls, opening out to Earth’s most remote and threatened environments. It is by relaying the beauty of these places that Forman hopes to instill in others the same deep love of landscapes that she has known since childhood. “When you love something, you want to protect it,” she said.

Bridging Fact and Emotion

The psychology behind public engagement suggests that the visual narratives provided through art help people process, internalize, and respond to information more effectively than facts alone. By molding their experiences into an opportunity for emotional connection, artists form a keystone between the viewer and the changing climate.

Forman first sought to do this through capturing the ice. For artist Jeff Frost, it began with wildfire — or, more accurately, 70 different wildfires over the span of five years. His compilation of this footage, a 25-minute film entitled “California on Fire,” is structured around the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance. With each one, the intangibility of the climate crisis becomes something familiar — its vastness, personal.

“My feeling is that if you make art that is trying to be didactic first, it probably won’t be very good art,” said Frost. “I primarily try to connect with people’s hearts and curiosity.”

It is a distinction that Caroline Juang knows well, both as an artist herself and a Ph.D. student with Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Science and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her research involves analyzing the steady increase of burned forest area in the western United States. “Science is there to give the information, to support this idea of climate change,” said Juang. “With Jeff’s film, it’s almost as if your house is burning down, or if your house is not burning down, that you’re the firefighter.”

Turning Emotion into Action

Frost will be the first to acknowledge that equitably and comprehensively addressing the climate crisis requires structural change. Behind any structural change, however, is the relentless and ongoing effort to demand a better future.

“Artists can’t directly make policy,” he said, “but we can help influence other people, including the politicians themselves.”

As for what to do upon being inspired by a piece of art, Forman and Frost agree there is no one way to approach climate action. “It’s about figuring out what your sharpest tool is,” said Forman. “When what you do is really coming from the heart — coming from you — then that is where you can move people the most.”

Art by Zaria Forman, James Prosek, and Jeff Frost is on display at Mana Contemporary from April 22 to July 22 as part of the exhibition, “Implied Scale: Confronting the Enormity of Climate Change.” 

To help advance the work of climate scientists and experts  working on our most pressing issues, please consider supporting  the Earth Institute  and  Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory  today. You can also learn more on our  Earth Day website .

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Reflective writing: Reflective essays

• What is reflection? Why do it?
• What does reflection involve?
• Reflective questioning
• Reflective writing for academic assessment
• Types of reflective assignments
• Differences between discursive and reflective writing
• Sources of evidence for reflective writing assignments
• Linking theory to experience
• Reflective essays
• Portfolios and learning journals, logs and diaries
• Examples of reflective writing
• Video summary
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On this page:

“Try making the conscious effort to reflect on the link between your experience and the theory, policies or studies you are reading” Williams et al., Reflective Writing

Writing a reflective essay

When you are asked to write a reflective essay, you should closely examine both the question and the marking criteria. This will help you to understand what you are being asked to do. Once you have examined the question you should start to plan and develop your essay by considering the following:

• What experience(s) and/or event(s) are you going to reflect on?
• How can you present these experience(s) to ensure anonymity (particularly important for anyone in medical professions)?
• How can you present the experience(s) with enough context for readers to understand?
• What learning can you identify from the experience(s)?
• What theories, models, strategies and academic literature can be used in your reflection?
• How this experience will inform your future practice

When structuring your reflection, you can present it in chronological order (start to finish) or in reverse order (finish to start). In some cases, it may be more appropriate for you to structure it around a series of flashbacks or themes, relating to relevant parts of the experience.

Example Essay Structure

This is an example structure for a reflective essay focusing on a single experience or event:

When you are writing a reflective assessment, it is important you keep your description to a minimum. This is because the description is not actually reflection and it often counts for only a small number of marks. This is not to suggest the description is not important. You must provide enough description and background for your readers to understand the context.

You need to ensure you discuss your feelings, reflections, responses, reactions, conclusions, and future learning. You should also look at positives and negatives across each aspect of your reflection and ensure you summarise any learning points for the future.

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Reflective essays

Guidance and information on using reflective essays.

The reflective essay is one of the most common reflective assignments and is very frequently used for both formative and especially summative assessments. Reflective essays are about presenting reflections to an audience in a systematic and formal way.

Generally, all good academic practice for assignments applies when posing reflective essays.

Typical reflective essay questions

Reflective essays tend to deal with a reflective prompt that the essay needs to address. This also often means that the essay will have to draw on a range of experiences and theories to fully and satisfactorily answer the question.

The questions/prompts should not be too vague, for example ‘reflect on your learning’, but should define an area or an aspect relevant to your learning outcomes. This is most easily ensured with thorough guidelines, highlighting elements expected in the essay.

Questions could be something like (not exhaustive):

• reflect on learning in the course with regards to [choose an aspect]
• reflect on personal development across an experience with regards to certain skills
• reflect on development towards subject benchmarks statements and the extent to which these are achieved
• reflect on the progression towards the course’s defined learning outcomes or the school’s or the University’s Graduate Attributes
• reflect on some theory relevant to the course. (Remember that for this to be a reflective essay and not an academic/critical essay, the student must use that theory to explain/inform their own experiences, and use their own experiences to criticise and put the theory into context – that is, how theory and experience inform one another.)

Typical structure and language

Reflective essays will often require theoretical literature, but this is not always essential.  Reflective essays can be built around a single individual experience, but will often draw on a series of individual experiences – or one long experience, for example an internship, that is broken into individual experiences.

The typical language and structure is formal – for thorough descriptions on this, see ‘Academic reflections: tips, language and structure’ in the Reflectors’ Toolkit, which can be valuable to highlight to students.

Academic reflections: tips, language and structure (within the Reflectors’ Toolkit)

Length and assignment weight if assessed

There is no one length that a reflective essay must take. As with all written assignments, the main consideration is that the length is appropriate for evidencing learning, answering the question and meeting the criteria.

Similarly, there is no clear answer for what percentage of the overall mark is attached to the assignment. However, the choice should mirror the required workload for the reflector to complete it, how that fits into your initiative, and the amount of preparation the reflector has had.

For instance, if the student has received formative feedback on multiple pieces of work, a larger proportion of the course mark may be appropriate, compared to if the student had not had a chance to practice. It is important to keep in mind that many students will not have had many chances to practice reflective essays before university.

Back to ‘Components of reflective tasks’

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• Published: 13 January 2021

Reflections on weather and climate research

• Wenjia Cai   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4436-512X 1 ,
• Christa Clapp   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7510-6921 2 ,
• Indrani Das   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8919-0693 3 ,
• Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9443-4915 4 ,
• Adelle Thomas   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0407-2891 5 , 6 &
• Jessica E. Tierney   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9080-9289 7  

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume  2 ,  pages 9–14 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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• Climate-change impacts
• Climate-change mitigation
• Climate sciences
• Cryospheric science
• Palaeoclimate

To celebrate the first anniversary of Nature Reviews Earth & Environment , we asked six researchers investigating weather and climate to outline notable developments within their discipline and provide thoughts on important work yet to be done.

Broadly, what are some of the key advances and exciting future prospects in your discipline within weather and climate research ?

Wenjia Cai. To date, countries and cities that account for more than half of global GDP have set or intended to set carbon neutrality goals, leading to a vast amount of literature focused on the impacts of different carbon mitigation pathways. Of this booming research area, distinct progress has been made in incorporating additional dimensions to the impacts, improving analysis resolution and developing solution-oriented results.

Traditionally, research in mitigation impacts was very much focused on understanding the technical or macroeconomic costs. Such a narrow focus, however, is no longer satisfactory. Instead, thanks to interdisciplinary research and advances in integrated assessment models with multiple modules, great attempts have been made to assess the multiple dimensions of mitigation impacts, including environmental, ecological, employment, health, equity and other social costs 1 . In this way, research can compare and select a specific carbon mitigation pathway that does not conflict with other sustainable development goals.

Studies within the field of mitigation impacts are also usually focused on global or national scales, or, at best, at provincial scales with sectoral details. However, to achieve a just transition, provincial-level and sectoral-level results are not enough. Owing partially to the emergence of multi-source data and big data, researchers are now zooming in to explore the distributional effects. For example, there are capabilities to assess how mitigation impacts are distributed among different regions or even emission sources, and between groups with different age, income, gender, race and educational backgrounds. With this knowledge, policymakers can more effectively choose a carbon mitigation pathway that rectifies structural inequalities and addresses factors that privilege some while disadvantaging others.

Although most current studies can identify benefits and trade-offs for the predefined carbon mitigation pathways, they are usually powerless when faced with the ‘now what’ question raised by the policymakers. That is, most studies cannot provide practical solutions and quantitative suggestions on how to maximize the benefits and reduce the trade-offs. Therefore, due to the policy need, incorporating these impacts analyses into policymaking has become a new area of considerable growth. Such studies can take the two-way interactions between pathways and impacts into consideration and help identify a solution with the least social cost or the most social benefit.

Despite these advances, we should not forget the original intentions of analysing carbon mitigation pathways — that is, to push for early and adequate climate action. Have we achieved this intention after decades of development in economics of climate change? Yes and no. Yes because an increasing number of countries are making pledges for carbon neutrality by around the 2050s. No because global greenhouse gas emissions in the last decade are still rising at a rate of 1.5% per year, contrasting to the 7.6% annual average reduction rate required by the 1.5 °C target. Although COVID-19 puts most economies on pause and gives them a chance to choose a green recovery, we still see many recovery plans highly associated with fossil fuels. Why is the gap widening between the reality and the target? From my perspective, it is because the academic efforts to date still fail to solve the temporal and spatial mismatch problem that has long been embedded in the impacts analyses of addressing climate change.

In particular, early and adequate actions imply getting over the reluctance to transform business and life today and, yet, the benefits, or the avoided damages, are usually expected in the far future, at the risk of being free-ridden by someone in other regions. For policymakers who look no further ahead than the next election, those huge benefits can be easily ignored if not cashable within their political term.

Therefore, it is important to further specify the temporal and spatial details of the impacts of different carbon mitigation pathways. To be clearer, the academic community needs to better explore the short-term (or even immediate) and local mitigation impacts 2 . For example, the newly built renewable energy power plants are becoming cheaper than new coal or gas-fuelled power plants, even when the environmental externalities from coal and gas are excluded 3 . This cost competitiveness will push for spontaneous decarbonization of the power system today, reduce the energy cost of the whole economy and spare money for extra investment and consumption. Moreover, the better air quality brought by renewable energy would reduce the local health burden immediately and improve human well-being and labour productivity. Both of the above-mentioned effects would contribute to short-term local economic growth, which is the eternal pursuit of local policymakers around the world. Cases like these should become an important supplement to existing studies.

Christa Clapp. Just three years ago, researchers were lamenting the scarcity of journal articles on climate finance, and investors were being urged by non-governmental organizations and student protestors to consider the moral imperative of divesting from fossil fuels 4 . That has now changed. We have new journals and special issues, university courses and programmes dedicated to sustainable finance, a shift in the discourse from a moral imperative to risk-framing, and companies answering questions related to the climate, environment and sustainable development goals from active investors.

As awareness of climate change has increased in the financial sector, research has expanded to understand investors’ motivations for acting on climate risk, assess the willingness of investors to pay a premium for green-labelled financial products, quantify the investments required to transition to a low-carbon economy and recognize stranded assets resulting from a transition to higher carbon prices.

However, the research community is still catching up to the change in pace of the financial sector, and far greater understanding is required in the environmental impacts of finance. In particular, there remains very little interdisciplinary research on how financial regulations and investment decisions can impact the climate, vital for understanding how the financial sector can support the transition to a low-carbon and climate-resilient economy. This imbalance may arise, in part, from a lack of data, but is also undoubtedly linked to research silos, specifically, financial implications being separate from environmental studies. Future efforts are required to break down these silos, particularly given that crossover between finance, environmental science and policy is increasingly required to influence sustainable development decisions.

The recent growth in voluntary and regulatory initiatives for climate risk disclosure can provide increased transparency to investors, but to make an environmental impact, the disclosed information needs to be analysed, compared and incorporated into financial decisions. The European Union Taxonomy tool on sustainable finance aims to facilitate disclosure (including on the energy efficiency of new buildings), yet, cannot fully substitute for environmental regulations, such as stricter building codes or stronger carbon pricing mechanisms. However, there is very little research on the market implications and environmental impacts of climate risk disclosure regulation. For instance, what is the expected impact on financial markets, and, ultimately, on the environment, of the EU directive to large companies on ‘non-financial’ reporting of climate risk?

To meet these growing demands on climate risk disclosure, investors are asking questions about how to align investment portfolios comprised of a range of diverse companies with the Paris Agreement. Decision-makers in the financial sector today face a confusing array of climate risk information, either reported in an inconsistent manner by companies themselves or wrapped up in aggregated environmental, social and corporate governance scores. There are many new tools for assessing risk, but these generally lack transparency on methods and data 5 . At the firm level, the IPCC and the International Energy Agency have a whole new customer base for their climate and energy scenarios. Yet, being focused on mid-century or end-of-century trajectories, existing scenarios are ill-suited to guide very-near-term risk-based investment decisions, presenting challenges for debt decisions with a 3–5-year time frame.

At the macro level, central banks are increasingly concerned about financial instability and macroeconomic impacts of climate risk resulting from tightening carbon prices or increasing damage costs from flooding, fires and other extreme events. Explorations on potential instability require coordination across financial and climate change modelling and research communities. Indeed, the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) calls for increased risk disclosure from financial institutions. However, with 37 different case studies of environmental risk analysis showcased by the NGFS, all with different scope and perspective, the overall effect could be described as scattershot 6 .

These challenges in assessing market and system impacts and improving climate risk data for financial decisions highlight that sustainable finance is a rich field for further research. In the coming years, researchers in the fields of finance, climate science and policy must further integrate interdisciplinary perspectives to bring new insights to the burgeoning field of sustainable finance, in particular, to understand how financial sector regulations and initiatives can support, or hinder, climate action.

Indrani Das. Some of the most compelling science questions in glaciology have focused on West Antarctica, including the inherent instability and potential irreversible retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).

Driving advances in such questions has been enormous progress in satellite and airborne technologies, making it possible to monitor ice sheets and their floating extensions — ice shelves — on a continental scale, and ice elevation on a global scale, all with better accuracy. The combined data from NASA’s ICESat and ICESat-2, for example, have shown that the WAIS contributed ~7.5 mm of sea level equivalent during 2003–2019 (ref. 7 ). In addition, multiple national and international satellites with various sensors are now collecting critical ice-sheet-wide parameters, including ice surface elevation, ice surface velocity, surface melt features and albedo, and gravimetric ice mass change, shaping our fundamental knowledge of dominant processes impacting ice sheet mass balance and ice dynamics required to improve projections of sea level rise.

Where satellite technology does not exist, airborne surveys have been conducted to further understanding. NASA’s Operation IceBridge, a major airborne mission, recently concluded after surveying both poles for a decade. IceBridge provided measurements of critical parameters such as ice surface elevation changes from laser altimetry; ice thickness, bedrock topography and snow accumulation rates from ice-penetrating radars; and bathymetry using gravimeters. These critical remote sensing datasets are used in continental-scale ice sheet and ocean models, in the evaluation of regional climate models, and to better understand how ice sheets and ice shelves interact with the warming atmosphere and the ocean.

In addition to data advances, progress has been made in understanding the potential instability of West Antarctica. The WAIS is considered to be fundamentally unstable because it is situated on a reverse-sloping (sloping inland) bed located largely below sea level. The grounding line of the WAIS — that is, the region where the ice sheet loses contact with the bedrock and starts to float, forming an ice shelf — is theoretically susceptible to runaway retreat via a process called marine ice sheet instability 8 (MISI). MISI progresses when the grounding line retreats on a reverse bed slope where ice is progressively thicker. Any further retreat on this slope always produces a progressively larger ice flux because of increased ice thickness and because ice starts to move faster to counter the increased mass loss. This process, although may be initially triggered by climate, can become irreversible because of the positive feedback between ice dynamics and mass balance. Indeed, the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and the Cryosphere suggests that rapid ice loss from glacier acceleration in the Amundsen Sea could indicate the onset of MISI, but that observational records are too limited to assess the irreversibility 9 .

In the meantime, studies have now clearly demonstrated that ocean-induced basal melt is responsible for faster grounding line retreats and rapid thinning of ice shelves in the warmer Amundsen Sea sector of the WAIS. This thinning includes the large, fast-moving and fast-changing Thwaites Glacier and its equally impressive neighbour, the Pine Island Glacier. The warm circumpolar deep water from the Amundsen Sea thins their ice shelves, transports heat to their grounding lines and carves melt channels underneath their ice shelves. Surface-melt-induced ice shelf hydrofracture, subglacial hydrology and bed conditions impact the mass loss but are harder to constrain. In addition, poorly understood theories need to be tested for their feasibility, such as the marine ice cliff instability. The ice shelf of Thwaites Glacier, in particular, has suffered extensive damage from basal melting, crevassing and calving of icebergs. If Thwaites Glacier retreats completely, it may cause structural damage to the nearby areas too. This area holds enough water to raise the sea level by ~3 m, although complete retreat may take a few centuries based on our current understanding of important processes that govern the mass loss 10 . However, because of the interrelations and feedbacks between some of the processes, it is often challenging to isolate the main drivers of mass loss.

Sustained observations, both remote sensing and field-based, are, therefore, crucial to improve our understanding of the hierarchy of physical processes and for their accurate parameterization in the continental-scale ice sheet models to identify the main drivers of change and improve projections of sea level rise. Ongoing international observation and modelling efforts such as the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration are a good step forward. Integrating high-resolution observations with Earth system models that accurately represent dominant physical processes is critical for improving projections of sea level rise, as is evaluating these models against further observations. However, as ice sheets are continually evolving in response to climate, this task is not trivial and requires huge coordinated efforts. We are experiencing climate change right now. Therefore, continued science activities should also progress together with coastal planning and management to effectively mitigate the impacts of climate change and sea level rise.

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick. Over the last two decades, we have endured a litany of high-impact extreme events across the globe. Catastrophic wildfires have simultaneously raged over North America and Australia. Heatwaves have collectively caused tens of thousands of deaths over Europe, India and Pakistan. Severe hurricanes have ravaged communities spanning the USA to the Philippines. And new types of extremes, such as marine heatwaves, have been discovered, along with their devastating impacts on marine ecosystems.

It is not a stretch to say that our scientific understanding of climate and weather extremes has exploded over recent years. A notable facilitator of this expansion is the availability of data at spatial and temporal scales on which many (though not all) extreme events occur. Observations, reanalyses and climate models, for instance, now readily encapsulate daily or sub-daily timescales, a marked development since pre-CMIP3. In a similar manner, the increased spatial resolution of models and observational products has allowed for a better understanding of how extremes are changing, as well as the physical mechanisms underpinning them. For example, finer-scale regional models have more realistic representations of tropical cyclones compared with global climate models. Moreover, models that simulate the type and persistence of blocking highs associated with heatwaves also provide better representations of heatwaves themselves. It is a certainty that accessibility to high-resolution spatio-temporal data has been fundamental in allowing scientists to categorize, measure, detect changes in and understand the drivers of many types of climate and weather extremes.

However, whilst high-resolution data are necessary for improving our understanding of extremes, it is not sufficient. Extremes, by their definition, are rare events, and, thus, adequate sampling is critical. Large, multi-member climate model ensembles have helped to address this undersampling and have been key in demonstrating the important role internal climate variability has on extremes 11 . Indeed, trends in extremes can differ greatly even in the same climate model, where otherwise identical realizations have miniscule changes in their initial conditions, suggesting the crucial importance of the timing and periodicity of variability phases on the overall detected signal. Such findings are not possible in smaller samples of extreme events — inclusive of observations — where only one representation of a plausible temporal pattern of variability is present.

Moreover, we have now reached a point where increasing resolution is no longer enough to advance our understanding of extreme events. For example, simply increasing the resolution of contemporary CMIP6 climate models does not improve the simulation of precipitation extremes 12 . Whilst high(er) resolution data were, therefore, initially critical in adequately detecting extremes in climate models, the inclusion of key physical processes and their exchanges is now equally important in understanding how extreme events evolve, decay, interact and change over decadal or longer timescales. Appropriately developing fine-scale physics in a climate model is a monumental task, further compounded by access to adequate computational resources and the number of climate models that require this improvement. These roadblocks are likely impediments on further leaps in advancing knowledge of climate extremes that will exist for some time yet.

Detection and attribution research is another noteworthy advance, quantifying the role of anthropogenic climate change behind extreme events. This field has rapidly advanced over the last 15 years, supported by robust statistical methods and advances in high-resolution and larger sample sizes of model data. However, assessments of how anthropogenic climate change has altered the frequency and/or intensity of a specific (perhaps record-breaking) event, or driven long-term changes in that event for a particular region, are only as good as the model(s) employed. For example, if a model cannot adequately simulate a known physical mechanism of an extreme, then it is very unlikely to simulate how climate change affects that mechanism, and, thus, the corresponding extreme in the attribution assessment. Attribution assessments are undoubtedly powerful tools and an extraordinary development, but could also benefit from increasing process-scale understanding of extremes within climate models in the future.

A new era of climate extremes is now emerging, with black-swan events in the form of wildfires, heatwaves (marine and atmospheric), tropical cyclones, droughts and floods occurring over many parts of the globe. Compound extremes are also being recognized, where different extreme events closely occur together in time and/or space 13 . If we are to adapt to, and effectively mitigate, anthropogenic climate change, we must advance our understanding of these types of extremes — and soon — as it is changes in extremes that have the most devastating impacts. While climate model resources will continue to be useful to study changes in extreme events, we require a major development in the understanding and modelling of physical mechanisms on a scale similar to the availability of daily data in the mid-2000s to obtain anything more than an incremental advance over the next 15 years.

Adelle Thomas. Several recent notable advances have been apparent within climate adaptation research, expanding understanding of how societies are adapting, the limits of adaptation, as well as loss and damage. Early research, for example, largely focused on theoretical ideologies and justifying the need for adaptation on top of mitigation. More recently, however, there has been a concentration of literature that explores the lived experiences of adaptation in different contexts and scales, increasing and diversifying the evidence base on how societies are responding to climate risks. For instance, the recent growth of research on community-based adaptation stems from acknowledgement of the importance of harnessing local knowledge and increasing local adaptive capacities to address the impacts of climate change 14 .

The expanding adaptation literature has also supported key advances in recognizing the limits of adaptation. Recent empirical studies have built on prior theories of potential tipping points and boundaries of adaptation to show how specific communities and ecosystems are already experiencing adaptation limits. For example, small-scale farmers are finding that existing adaptation strategies are insufficient to prevent loss of crops and are, therefore, shifting to different livelihoods as a result. Analysis of the constraints and limits to adaptation echoes the early period of adaptation research when there was an assumption that successful mitigation would negate the need for adaptation. We now increasingly understand that there are limits to the ability of adaptation to reduce climate risk and that, despite adaptive efforts, climate impacts still remain.

Moreover, loss and damage literature has broadened, spanning analysis of the many conceptualizations of what the term encompasses, to acknowledgement of the importance of the non-economic negative impacts of climate change (such as loss of sense of place and damage to culturally and spiritually significant landscapes). Indeed, the importance of loss and damage in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) spurred inclusion of this research for the first time in the IPCC in the SR1.5 (ref. 15 ). The increasing evidence base on loss and damage responds to calls from particularly vulnerable nations and communities that are already experiencing impacts of climate change despite adaptive efforts.

These advances point to the need for a focus on transformation in future adaptation research, particularly as it becomes increasingly evident that small-scale and incremental adaptation measures currently being planned and implemented are insufficient to prevent climate risks. Although the IPCC SR1.5 underscored the necessity of widespread and unprecedented levels of both mitigation and adaptation to address the challenges of climate change, there is still limited research on these topics. Research that explores transformational adaptation possibilities and modalities for a range of actors reflecting different contexts and scales, and also how actors must collaborate to facilitate transformation, is desperately needed.

However, when considering future prospects for adaptation research, the events of 2020 cannot be ignored. The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant effects on all of us, including those that are already most vulnerable to climate change. Research plans have been cancelled or postponed, and modalities that have served more qualitative adaptation research in the past — such as in-person interviews and focus groups — are increasingly unfeasible. The global Black Lives Matter movement brought to the fore long-standing systemic and institutionalized racism that is present not only in the United States but in many nations around the world. Such racial injustice has resulted not only in the deaths of black people as a result of police brutality but also in the increased vulnerability of black people and other communities of colour to the impacts of climate change. Systemic racism also results in the marginalization of black climate experts, who face additional burdens of operating within unjust structures. These events signal the need for more inclusive, equitable and innovative approaches to adaptation research moving forward.

There is, thus, also a need for transformation in our approaches to adaptation research. We must look at our own roles in economic and social power relations that have historically been unjust and act to facilitate change. How can we contribute to closing the research gap of studies that originate from the Global South and that consist not only of case studies but also of contributions to and critiques of adaptation theory 16 ? How can we bolster the sparse literature that includes or even centres racial disparities that are present in adaptation processes? How can we support development of truly transformational adaptation that does not reinforce existing unjust structures but also transforms underlying systems that have led to existing inequalities? How can we conduct meaningful research to enact change when modalities are restricted? These are big questions and there are no easy fixes. Simple steps such as being more inclusive of locally based researchers, working with civil society organizations and developing community science approaches to more actively engage and work with at-risk communities are a start to addressing issues of justice, as well as to developing innovative research processes. Continuing and expanding such measures even when the pandemic is a memory and the racial justice protests are no longer in the media is critical to transform the practice of adaptation research to be more inclusive, just and innovative.

Jessica E. Tierney. Atmospheric CO 2 levels now exceed 400 ppm — a value that the Earth has not experienced in 3 million years — and most of this rise occurred in the last 60 years. As a palaeoclimatologist, this is frightening. The rate of anthropogenic carbon emissions is higher than any known event in geological history. We are already seeing the impacts unfold, right before our eyes: melting ice, rising sea level, more acidic oceans.

Where are we headed in the future? We know that a high-CO 2 world is a warmer world, but how much warmer will it get? Climate model projections diverge on this because models have different sensitivities to rising CO 2 . Many of the new models participating in the CMIP6, which will guide the next IPCC assessment, have high climate sensitivity, meaning that they predict a large warming by the end of the century. How do we know whether this is realistic? And, beyond temperature changes, what about the water cycle? How will regional water availability change in a warmer world? Even with all of the improvements that have been made regarding the representation of land and atmospheric processes, climate models still disagree about both the sign and the magnitude of precipitation change in most regions across Earth.

In my view, the past is the key to the future. As we seek to narrow projections of future change, there is a renewed role for palaeoclimate studies to understand what is possible. Past climates can be used to constrain climate sensitivity, study what happens during extreme CO 2 emissions, understand regional-scale and seasonal-scale changes in the water cycle, and determine the response of the cryosphere 17 . In particular, ancient warm climates — such as the Pliocene (3 million years ago), the Eocene (50 million years ago) and the middle Cretaceous (90 million years ago) — offer key opportunities to study what happens to the Earth in a high-CO 2 world.

While constraining metrics like Earth’s climate sensitivity and the strength of climatic feedbacks has long been a fundamental goal of palaeoclimatology, a number of recent advances in both palaeoclimate modelling and reconstruction techniques have allowed for a firmer connection to form between studies of past and future climate. As a community, we are developing more quantitative methods to rigorously represent uncertainty, such as using Bayesian inference, and we are starting to adapt spatio-temporal reconstruction techniques like data assimilation for use in palaeoclimates 18 . We are also seeing increasing efforts to collate, synthesize and analyse large datasets from key intervals in time, like the Last Glacial Maximum (the coldest climate of at least the last 100 million years) 18 and the early Eocene ‘greenhouse’ (50 million years ago) 19 . In addition to serving as ‘targets’ for climate models to be tested against, temperature and CO 2 data from these time periods can be used to constrain climate sensitivity in radically altered climates. Encouragingly, palaeoclimate information tends to suggest values around 3–4 °C that have long been the climate community’s ‘best guess’ 18 , 19 . On the flip side, we are discovering that Earth system models with a sensitivity above 5 °C per doubling of CO 2 (of which there are several in CMIP6) fail to simulate past climates, producing results that are either too cold or too hot because they are too sensitive to CO 2 (ref. 20 ). Unfortunately, these studies tend to happen after the climate model development phase, rather than during it. Palaeoclimatologists are trying to encourage modern climate researchers to involve us in the model development phase and benchmark the models against palaeoclimates. In this way, we can avoid using models to predict future climate that cannot predict the past (which, arguably, are not trustworthy, especially under high-emissions scenarios) and narrow projections.

The water cycle is the new frontier for palaeoclimatology. Tree rings have given us an amazing view of regional drought changes over the last few thousand years, but, before that, our understanding gets hazy. In particular, we do not yet have a good handle on what happens to regional patterns of precipitation in warm climates. While there is a long-held view that high CO 2 causes “wet regions to get wetter and dry regions to get drier”, we know from theory that this maxim does not really hold over land. In the subtropics in particular, we need to consider changes in the seasonal cycle in rainfall and how the monsoon systems respond to warmer temperatures. The palaeoclimate evidence that is out there already is intriguing. For example, the presence of ancient lake basins in the region where I live (the south-west USA) that date to the Pliocene suggests that, somewhat counter-intuitively, the south-west region was wetter in this warmer world. I am confident that, with more study — using both on-the-ground data and climate model simulations — we can get a better view of what happens to the regional water cycle in warm climates and that this will be key to understanding future water availability.

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Acknowledgements

S.P.-K. is supported by Australian Research Council grant number FT170100106. I.D. acknowledges the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation.

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Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modelling, Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Center for International Climate Research (CICERO), Oslo, Norway

Christa Clapp

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY, USA

Indrani Das

Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick

Climate Analytics, Berlin, Germany

Adelle Thomas

Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Research Centre, University of The Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas

Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

Jessica E. Tierney

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Contributions

Wenjia Cai is an Associate Professor of Global Change Economics in the Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Her research interest is the evaluation of climate mitigation’s impacts on environment and health. She is the co-director of the Lancet Countdown Regional Centre for Asia and leads the China report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change. She was a member of the Chinese delegation to the UN climate negotiations.

Christa Clapp leads the climate finance work at CICERO and is a co-founder and managing partner of CICERO Shades of Green Ltd., a subsidiary of the research institute that is a global leader in green ratings for bonds. She is a Lead Author for the IPCC 6th assessment report on finance and investment.

Indrani Das is an Associate Research Professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, USA. As a glaciologist and climate scientist, her research uses remote sensing observations and ice sheet modelling to understand the evolving ice sheets, ice shelves and their interactions with the ocean and the atmosphere. Indrani is a strong proponent of STEM education and science communication.

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick is a Senior Lecturer/ARC Future Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. As a Climate Scientist specializing in extreme events, her expertise focuses on heatwaves — how to measure them, how they have changed, how they will change — and employing detection and attribution methods to understand how climate change is influencing heatwaves and their impacts.

Adelle Thomas is a Senior Research Associate with Climate Analytics and Director of the Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Research Centre at the University of The Bahamas. As a human-environment geographer, her expertise centres on adaptation, limits to adaptation, and loss and damage, particularly in the small-island developing-state context. She is a Lead Author for the IPCC 6th assessment report on limits to adaptation and was a Lead Author for the IPCC SR1.5.

Jessica E. Tierney is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on using geochemical, statistical and modelling techniques to reconstruct past climate changes in order to better understand our future. She is a Lead Author in Working Group I for the upcoming IPCC AR6 assessment report.

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Correspondence to Wenjia Cai , Christa Clapp , Indrani Das , Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick , Adelle Thomas or Jessica E. Tierney .

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Cai, W., Clapp, C., Das, I. et al. Reflections on weather and climate research. Nat Rev Earth Environ 2 , 9–14 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-020-00123-x

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Issue Date : January 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-020-00123-x

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Why Write? Toward a Style for Climate Change

I t would seem that one of the many by-products of our fossil-fuel economy is books. The atmosphere warms, species are extinguished, the poor are displaced, and publishers publish. There’s not much a person can do about the first three, but reading books is an easy way to feel absolved of guilt. Did you catch the one by Jonathan Safran Foer? Or was it Franzen?

Precisely because we may be aware of the unevenly distributed injustices of the fossil-fuel economy and politically committed to ending them, we require a literary criticism of climate-change writing—a project like that of Rob Nixon , a scholar of the environmental humanities, for example. 1 Which is to say we need writing about writing about climate change that asks: What are the conventions of this coalescing genre? Nixon and other scholars have engaged this question, but a new volume of collected writing on climate change from the New Yorker presents a more focused lens for examining it. What is the value of journalism about climate change addressed, undoubtedly, to this literary magazine’s faithful readers? Why does this volume of repurposed, sometimes outdated reporting really need to exist?

While the book might be dismissed on these grounds, it is an anthology, after all, and anthologies designate a particular historical, intellectual, and aesthetic terrain. The Fragile Earth is an occasion. It announces a new genre and calls out for new criticism. Climate-change writing will not save the world, even if it sometimes seems to think it should, but it is likely to teach us something about how and why we write.

Climate-change writing tends to be characterized by an urgency, with no obvious outlet. It is haunted by its own futility.

The ideal case for environmental writing with both literary and political merit is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring . Although it is not about climate change per se, Carson’s account of the ecological devastation of pesticides is one of the primary models for all subsequent environmental writing for two reasons: first, because it led to actual policy change in the US, which subsequently banned the use of DDT. 2 And second, because it is a moving and even beautiful book. I don’t think these two things are unrelated.

Before it was published in book form, Silent Spring was serialized in three editions of the New Yorker , in 1962. 3 Later, in 1989, the magazine published a long essay by Bill McKibben called “Reflections: The End of Nature,” which described the emerging science and politics of climate change. The previous year, NASA’s James Hansen had testified about the consequences of greenhouse gases before members of the US Senate, earning wide press coverage; the UN had created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and George H. W. Bush had promised to combat the greenhouse effect with the “White House effect.” 4 It must have seemed possible that McKibben’s essay could be like Carson’s, that “The End of Nature” could movingly lead to genuine political change. Of course, that’s not what happened.

McKibben’s essay is now a classic exemplar of a genre whose canonicity is marked by the publication of this new anthology. In the foreword to The Fragile Earth , which begins with “The End of Nature” and spans the intervening 30 years, David Remnick, the New Yorker ’s editor, expresses a hope that the volume will demonstrate “that climate change isn’t an ‘issue’ to be considered among a list of others. Rather, it concerns the very preconditions for all species to go on living on this planet.” I realize this is meant to make the project sound heftier, but I can’t help but hear a note of resignation. Climate-change writing tends to be characterized by an urgency, with no obvious outlet. It is haunted by its own futility.

All Tomorrow’s Warnings

Of course, climate-change writing is a capacious category, and this volume showcases only one of its varieties. The New Yorker essay is a thing all its own. You will not find much radical anti-capitalism, for example, or many theoretical reflections on historical change. In classic New Yorker fashion, many of the contributions consist of rigorous reportage with a prominent authorial presence and a relatively constrained stylistic range.

The writers are always traveling places—from Antarctica to northern Alaska—and writing about what they see. It is a recognizable pattern, often detectable in the opening sentence: “The journey to the Chhota Shigri Glacier, in the Himalayan peaks of northern India … ”; “The town of El Valle de Antón, in central Panama, sits in the middle of a volcanic crater formed about a million years ago”; “Slapout, Oklahoma, at the intersection of a county road and a much used east-west state highway, has a population of five.” On our behalf, the reporters travel far and wide to witness species in the process of becoming extinct, apocalyptic wildfires, drought and famine, the persistent effects of colonialism, including extreme poverty and violent extremism, and a variety of other horrors created or exacerbated by climate change.

Indeed, witnessing is the likeliest justification for this variety of climate-change writing. In theory, at least, it could raise awareness of an issue (but only if it’s actually an issue) and its consequences. In a book about the emergence of the experimental method, the historians of science Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer identify a practice they call “virtual witnessing.” By publishing descriptions and images of “an experimental scene,” society members could “[obviate] the necessity for either direct witness or replication” of the experiment. “Through virtual witnessing,” they continue, “the multiplication of witnesses could be, in principle, unlimited. It was therefore the most powerful technology for constituting matters of fact.” 5 The prevalence of witnessing in The Fragile Earth suggests that it imagines itself to facilitate networks of consensus and solidarity that might not otherwise exist.

Americans are among those most responsible for climate change; is there value in confronting our handiwork?

It seems likely, however, that most people who read climate-change essays and monographs are already convinced of the urgency of the climate crisis. Will anybody not so convinced pay for and read an anthology of New Yorker essays about it? Even in the cases where learning more about climate change will lead to political action, it is not clear why such readers should buy this book, rather than a more up-to-date account of the situation.

This belatedness becomes an especially noticeable problem in the section about climate solutions. In one contribution from 2008, Michael Specter introduces the hope that carbon trading might encourage an end to deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia: “Possessing rights to carbon would grant new power to farmers who, for the first time, would be paid to preserve their forests rather than destroy them.” Specter acknowledges that “such plans are seen by many people as morally unattractive.” Subsequent reporting from outlets like The Atlantic and ProPublica has demonstrated just how right those many people were, showing how carbon trading has become a travesty of climate regulation. 6 This is the clearest instance where out-of-date reporting seems counterproductive and where the liberal response to climate change we might expect from the New Yorker seems least plausible. So-called market solutions are not likely to solve a problem that was, after all, supercharged by the market.

So maybe that’s not what this book is for. It’s not going to offer the likeliest way out of the problem. Are there other justifications for its existence? For example, is there an inherently moral dimension to witnessing? Americans are among those most responsible for climate change; is there value in confronting our handiwork? This moral perspective suggests that even if such writing doesn’t make a difference, we still have a duty to attend to the consequences of our actions. Maybe, but there’s something too navel-gazey in that idea for my taste. Reading about climate change doesn’t really put you on moral high ground. Self-castigation won’t get us anywhere good.

I think this book is good for something else entirely. In announcing and defining a genre, it forces vital questions on those in the business of climate writing and reading: What should climate-change writing be? What is its ambition as it moves forward?

Your Prius Is Not Enough

In my experience, climate-change writing is a distinctly unpleasant genre, with an emotional range that encompasses indignation, abjection, and grief, with occasional but diminishing hope. David Owen, one of the contributors to this volume, puts it best: “On a shelf in my office is a small pile of recent books about the environment that I plan to reread obsessively if I’m found to have a terminal illness, because they’re so unsettling that they may make me less upset about being snatched from my life in my prime.” The essays collected in The Fragile Earth are frequently unsettling, and they do not, in general, strive for the status of Literature (though there are moments when scenes of destruction are recounted with evocative and disconcertingly artful metaphor, such as when Christine Kenneally describes the apples hanging from a charred apple tree as “pitch-black round baubles”).

One of the collection’s ironies is that the two most essayistic—which is to say, most exploratory, reflective, and, in my view, captivating—pieces are also the ones in which you will learn the least about climate change: Jonathan Franzen’s “The End of the End of the World” and Kathryn Schulz’s “Writers in the Storm.” Franzen interweaves a sort of travel narrative—recounting his often absurd experience as an amateur birdwatcher on a luxury cruise to Antarctica (shades of David Foster Wallace)—with a family memoir. It is more personal essay than reportage. And Schulz’s contribution is an exceptionally panoptic work of criticism that traces the function of weather across a range of literary texts, from myths to contemporary works of fiction.

This begs a question: Can we judge climate-change writing for its style or its capacity for beauty? Kim Stanley Robinson is brilliant, but not because his Mars trilogy is particularly beautiful. Naomi Klein, too, is heroic, but more for the incisive clarity of thought than for the style of prose. The first salient fact about climate-change writing is that it is about climate change. The second is that it is about writing, and its value has as much to do with the writing part as with the climate part.

Writing, it seems to me, is a strange way to respond to the climate crisis. But then writing is a strange way to respond to anything. Some of the most beautiful and most valuable writing I am aware of is composed in the face of violence and injustice. When I read James Baldwin, John Berger, or Arundhati Roy, I am capable of the conviction that it is necessary to write beautifully about such things, that they are the raison d’être for writing itself, that in a perfectly just world there would be no need for writing. Maybe that is why Plato banished the poets.

If we think that another book about parts per million, degrees Celsius, and glacial melt is going to bring us closer to climate justice, or that the New Yorker will pull off another Silent Spring , then I’m not sure what we’re doing here. Don’t get me wrong: spreading knowledge is vital and will be an important part of any future action, especially in our current dysfunctional information environment. The New Yorker is famously, and commendably, reliable. Its two major climate writers since 1989—McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert, who are both well represented in this volume—have earned widespread admiration and praise. But in asking readers to think about climate-change writing as a genre, this book underscores the fact that spreading knowledge isn’t enough.

Future climate-change writing will be especially useful insofar as, in addition to raising awareness, it rejects the temptation of the techno-fix and market solution and, instead, undertakes the work of reimagining our appallingly unjust and violent economic system. Ideologies are difficult to see because we live inside them. Climate-change writing, like a lot of writing, is valuable if and when it renders visible the violence and injustice of those ideologies and, just as importantly, imagines radical possible futures outside of them. Style and beauty may actually be necessary for such a project.

• See also Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011). ↩
• Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury, 2010), especially chapter 7. ↩
• Rachel Carson, “ Silent Spring–I ,” New Yorker , June 16, 1962; “ Silent Spring–II ,” New Yorker , June 23, 1962; “ Silent Spring–III ,” New Yorker , June 30, 1962. ↩
• Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt , pp. 183–85. ↩
• Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 60. ↩
• Ryan Jacobs, “ The Forest Mafia: How Scammers Steal Millions through Carbon Markets ,” Atlantic , October 11, 2013. Lisa Song and Paula Moura, “ An Even More Inconvenient Truth: Why Carbon Credits for Forest Preservation May Be Worse than Nothing ,” ProPublica , May 22, 2019. ↩

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Essay on Global Warming

• Updated on  
• Apr 27, 2024

Being able to write an essay is an integral part of mastering any language. Essays form an integral part of many academic and scholastic exams like the SAT, and UPSC amongst many others. It is a crucial evaluative part of English proficiency tests as well like IELTS, TOEFL, etc. Major essays are meant to emphasize public issues of concern that can have significant consequences on the world. To understand the concept of Global Warming and its causes and effects, we must first examine the many factors that influence the planet’s temperature and what this implies for the world’s future. Here’s an unbiased look at the essay on Global Warming and other essential related topics.

Short Essay on Global Warming and Climate Change?

Since the industrial and scientific revolutions, Earth’s resources have been gradually depleted. Furthermore, the start of the world’s population’s exponential expansion is particularly hard on the environment. Simply put, as the population’s need for consumption grows, so does the use of natural resources , as well as the waste generated by that consumption.

Climate change has been one of the most significant long-term consequences of this. Climate change is more than just the rise or fall of global temperatures; it also affects rain cycles, wind patterns, cyclone frequencies, sea levels, and other factors. It has an impact on all major life groupings on the planet.

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Also Read: Speech on Yoga Day

What is Global Warming?

Global warming is the unusually rapid increase in Earth’s average surface temperature over the past century, primarily due to the greenhouse gases released by people burning fossil fuels . The greenhouse gases consist of methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, carbon dioxide, water vapour, and chlorofluorocarbons. The weather prediction has been becoming more complex with every passing year, with seasons more indistinguishable, and the general temperatures hotter.

The number of hurricanes, cyclones, droughts, floods, etc., has risen steadily since the onset of the 21st century. The supervillain behind all these changes is Global Warming. The name is quite self-explanatory; it means the rise in the temperature of the Earth.

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What are the Causes of Global Warming?

According to recent studies, many scientists believe the following are the primary four causes of global warming:

• Deforestation 
• Greenhouse emissions
• Carbon emissions per capita

Extreme global warming is causing natural disasters , which can be seen all around us. One of the causes of global warming is the extreme release of greenhouse gases that become trapped on the earth’s surface, causing the temperature to rise. Similarly, volcanoes contribute to global warming by spewing excessive CO2 into the atmosphere.

The increase in population is one of the major causes of Global Warming. This increase in population also leads to increased air pollution . Automobiles emit a lot of CO2, which remains in the atmosphere. This increase in population is also causing deforestation, which contributes to global warming.

The earth’s surface emits energy into the atmosphere in the form of heat, keeping the balance with the incoming energy. Global warming depletes the ozone layer, bringing about the end of the world. There is a clear indication that increased global warming will result in the extinction of all life on Earth’s surface.

Also Read: Land, Soil, Water, Natural Vegetation, and Wildlife Resources

Solutions for Global Warming

Of course, industries and multinational conglomerates emit more carbon than the average citizen. Nonetheless, activism and community effort are the only viable ways to slow the worsening effects of global warming. Furthermore, at the state or government level, world leaders must develop concrete plans and step-by-step programmes to ensure that no further harm is done to the environment in general.

Although we are almost too late to slow the rate of global warming, finding the right solution is critical. Everyone, from individuals to governments, must work together to find a solution to Global Warming. Some of the factors to consider are pollution control, population growth, and the use of natural resources.

One very important contribution you can make is to reduce your use of plastic. Plastic is the primary cause of global warming, and recycling it takes years. Another factor to consider is deforestation, which will aid in the control of global warming. More tree planting should be encouraged to green the environment. Certain rules should also govern industrialization. Building industries in green zones that affect plants and species should be prohibited.

Also Read: Essay on Pollution

Effects of Global Warming

Global warming is a real problem that many people want to disprove to gain political advantage. However, as global citizens, we must ensure that only the truth is presented in the media.

This decade has seen a significant impact from global warming. The two most common phenomena observed are glacier retreat and arctic shrinkage. Glaciers are rapidly melting. These are clear manifestations of climate change.

Another significant effect of global warming is the rise in sea level. Flooding is occurring in low-lying areas as a result of sea-level rise. Many countries have experienced extreme weather conditions. Every year, we have unusually heavy rain, extreme heat and cold, wildfires, and other natural disasters.

Similarly, as global warming continues, marine life is being severely impacted. This is causing the extinction of marine species as well as other problems. Furthermore, changes are expected in coral reefs, which will face extinction in the coming years. These effects will intensify in the coming years, effectively halting species expansion. Furthermore, humans will eventually feel the negative effects of Global Warming.

Also Read: Concept of Sustainable Development

Sample Essays on Global Warming

Here are some sample essays on Global Warming:

Essay on Global Warming Paragraph in 100 – 150 words

Global Warming is caused by the increase of carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere and is a result of human activities that have been causing harm to our environment for the past few centuries now. Global Warming is something that can’t be ignored and steps have to be taken to tackle the situation globally. The average temperature is constantly rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius over the last few years.

The best method to prevent future damage to the earth, cutting down more forests should be banned and Afforestation should be encouraged. Start by planting trees near your homes and offices, participate in events, and teach the importance of planting trees. It is impossible to undo the damage but it is possible to stop further harm.

Also Read: Social Forestry

Essay on Global Warming in 250 Words

Over a long period, it is observed that the temperature of the earth is increasing. This affected wildlife, animals, humans, and every living organism on earth. Glaciers have been melting, and many countries have started water shortages, flooding, and erosion and all this is because of global warming. 

No one can be blamed for global warming except for humans. Human activities such as gases released from power plants, transportation, and deforestation have increased gases such as carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollutants in the earth’s atmosphere.                                              The main question is how can we control the current situation and build a better world for future generations. It starts with little steps by every individual. 

Start using cloth bags made from sustainable materials for all shopping purposes, instead of using high-watt lights use energy-efficient bulbs, switch off the electricity, don’t waste water, abolish deforestation and encourage planting more trees. Shift the use of energy from petroleum or other fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. Instead of throwing out the old clothes donate them to someone so that it is recycled. 

Donate old books, don’t waste paper.  Above all, spread awareness about global warming. Every little thing a person does towards saving the earth will contribute in big or small amounts. We must learn that 1% effort is better than no effort. Pledge to take care of Mother Nature and speak up about global warming.

Also Read: Types of Water Pollution

Essay on Global Warming in 500 Words

Global warming isn’t a prediction, it is happening! A person denying it or unaware of it is in the most simple terms complicit. Do we have another planet to live on? Unfortunately, we have been bestowed with this one planet only that can sustain life yet over the years we have turned a blind eye to the plight it is in. Global warming is not an abstract concept but a global phenomenon occurring ever so slowly even at this moment. Global Warming is a phenomenon that is occurring every minute resulting in a gradual increase in the Earth’s overall climate. Brought about by greenhouse gases that trap the solar radiation in the atmosphere, global warming can change the entire map of the earth, displacing areas, flooding many countries, and destroying multiple lifeforms. Extreme weather is a direct consequence of global warming but it is not an exhaustive consequence. There are virtually limitless effects of global warming which are all harmful to life on earth. The sea level is increasing by 0.12 inches per year worldwide. This is happening because of the melting of polar ice caps because of global warming. This has increased the frequency of floods in many lowland areas and has caused damage to coral reefs. The Arctic is one of the worst-hit areas affected by global warming. Air quality has been adversely affected and the acidity of the seawater has also increased causing severe damage to marine life forms. Severe natural disasters are brought about by global warming which has had dire effects on life and property. As long as mankind produces greenhouse gases, global warming will continue to accelerate. The consequences are felt at a much smaller scale which will increase to become drastic shortly. The power to save the day lies in the hands of humans, the need is to seize the day. Energy consumption should be reduced on an individual basis. Fuel-efficient cars and other electronics should be encouraged to reduce the wastage of energy sources. This will also improve air quality and reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Global warming is an evil that can only be defeated when fought together. It is better late than never. If we all take steps today, we will have a much brighter future tomorrow. Global warming is the bane of our existence and various policies have come up worldwide to fight it but that is not enough. The actual difference is made when we work at an individual level to fight it. Understanding its import now is crucial before it becomes an irrevocable mistake. Exterminating global warming is of utmost importance and each one of us is as responsible for it as the next.  

Also Read: Essay on Library: 100, 200 and 250 Words

Essay on Global Warming UPSC

Always hear about global warming everywhere, but do we know what it is? The evil of the worst form, global warming is a phenomenon that can affect life more fatally. Global warming refers to the increase in the earth’s temperature as a result of various human activities. The planet is gradually getting hotter and threatening the existence of lifeforms on it. Despite being relentlessly studied and researched, global warming for the majority of the population remains an abstract concept of science. It is this concept that over the years has culminated in making global warming a stark reality and not a concept covered in books. Global warming is not caused by one sole reason that can be curbed. Multifarious factors cause global warming most of which are a part of an individual’s daily existence. Burning of fuels for cooking, in vehicles, and for other conventional uses, a large amount of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, and methane amongst many others is produced which accelerates global warming. Rampant deforestation also results in global warming as lesser green cover results in an increased presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which is a greenhouse gas.  Finding a solution to global warming is of immediate importance. Global warming is a phenomenon that has to be fought unitedly. Planting more trees can be the first step that can be taken toward warding off the severe consequences of global warming. Increasing the green cover will result in regulating the carbon cycle. There should be a shift from using nonrenewable energy to renewable energy such as wind or solar energy which causes less pollution and thereby hinder the acceleration of global warming. Reducing energy needs at an individual level and not wasting energy in any form is the most important step to be taken against global warming. The warning bells are tolling to awaken us from the deep slumber of complacency we have slipped into. Humans can fight against nature and it is high time we acknowledged that. With all our scientific progress and technological inventions, fighting off the negative effects of global warming is implausible. We have to remember that we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors but borrow it from our future generations and the responsibility lies on our shoulders to bequeath them a healthy planet for life to exist. 

Also Read: Essay on Disaster Management

Climate Change and Global Warming Essay

Global Warming and Climate Change are two sides of the same coin. Both are interrelated with each other and are two issues of major concern worldwide. Greenhouse gases released such as carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollutants in the earth’s atmosphere cause Global Warming which leads to climate change. Black holes have started to form in the ozone layer that protects the earth from harmful ultraviolet rays. 

Human activities have created climate change and global warming. Industrial waste and fumes are the major contributors to global warming. 

Another factor affecting is the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and also one of the reasons for climate change.  Global warming has resulted in shrinking mountain glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland, and the Arctic and causing climate change. Switching from the use of fossil fuels to energy sources like wind and solar. 

When buying any electronic appliance buy the best quality with energy savings stars. Don’t waste water and encourage rainwater harvesting in your community. 

Also Read: Essay on Air Pollution

Tips to Write an Essay

Writing an effective essay needs skills that few people possess and even fewer know how to implement. While writing an essay can be an assiduous task that can be unnerving at times, some key pointers can be inculcated to draft a successful essay. These involve focusing on the structure of the essay, planning it out well, and emphasizing crucial details.

Mentioned below are some pointers that can help you write better structure and more thoughtful essays that will get across to your readers:

• Prepare an outline for the essay to ensure continuity and relevance and no break in the structure of the essay
• Decide on a thesis statement that will form the basis of your essay. It will be the point of your essay and help readers understand your contention
• Follow the structure of an introduction, a detailed body followed by a conclusion so that the readers can comprehend the essay in a particular manner without any dissonance.
• Make your beginning catchy and include solutions in your conclusion to make the essay insightful and lucrative to read
• Reread before putting it out and add your flair to the essay to make it more personal and thereby unique and intriguing for readers  

Also Read: I Love My India Essay: 100 and 500+ Words in English for School Students

Ans. Both natural and man-made factors contribute to global warming. The natural one also contains methane gas, volcanic eruptions, and greenhouse gases. Deforestation, mining, livestock raising, burning fossil fuels, and other man-made causes are next.

Ans. The government and the general public can work together to stop global warming. Trees must be planted more often, and deforestation must be prohibited. Auto usage needs to be curbed, and recycling needs to be promoted.

Ans. Switching to renewable energy sources , adopting sustainable farming, transportation, and energy methods, and conserving water and other natural resources.

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Digvijay Singh

Having 2+ years of experience in educational content writing, withholding a Bachelor's in Physical Education and Sports Science and a strong interest in writing educational content for students enrolled in domestic and foreign study abroad programmes. I believe in offering a distinct viewpoint to the table, to help students deal with the complexities of both domestic and foreign educational systems. Through engaging storytelling and insightful analysis, I aim to inspire my readers to embark on their educational journeys, whether abroad or at home, and to make the most of every learning opportunity that comes their way.

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This was really a good essay on global warming… There has been used many unic words..and I really liked it!!!Seriously I had been looking for a essay about Global warming just like this…

Thank you for the comment!

I want to learn how to write essay writing so I joined this page.This page is very useful for everyone.

Hi, we are glad that we could help you to write essays. We have a beginner’s guide to write essays ( https://leverageedu.com/blog/essay-writing/ ) and we think this might help you.

It is not good , to have global warming in our earth .So we all have to afforestation program on all the world.

thank you so much

Very educative , helpful and it is really going to strength my English knowledge to structure my essay in future

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Global warming is the increase in 𝓽𝓱𝓮 ᴀᴠᴇʀᴀɢᴇ ᴛᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴀᴛᴜʀᴇs ᴏғ ᴇᴀʀᴛʜ🌎 ᴀᴛᴍᴏsᴘʜᴇʀᴇ

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8 Tips For Writing A Great Reflective Essay (With Examples)

By writing a reflective essay, you can capture some of these ephemeral emotions and make sense of who you are. Below, I share eight tips (and a few examples) that will help you do it in a better way. You may have to write a reflective essay as a part of an academic assignment or a college paper. Or perhaps you want to create it for yourself and never show it to anyone. Regardless of the reason, after reading this article, you will hopefully become better at it. They helped a lot of students over the years, so you may check them out.

Here’s how to write a great reflective essay:

1. first, what is a reflective essay, 2. the power of writing introspectively.

Many great men and women (like Charles Darwin or Frida Kahlo ) had a habit of keeping a journal. This seems to be forgotten these days as we record everything through our mobile devices. But the habit of introspective writing and journaling helps you get in touch with your inner self and even improves your mental health. The reflective essay serves a similar purpose. It lets you search for meaning in your life and lets you discover the underlying causes of your actions.

“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forwards.” – Søren Kierkegaard

3. How do you start your essay?

You may start with an introduction of experience, an event, or a memory on which you’ll reflect. If your topic is “a life-changing incident you had when you were a child,” you could start with: I used to live on a sunny farm with my parents and grandparents when I was young. A few days after I turned six, something happened that would alter the course of my life forever. I’m fifty-two as I’m writing this…

This beginning has certain elements that make it effective:

“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” – Ralph Ellison

4. Learn how to structure your essay

In terms of length, it all depends on your assignment, but usually, the reflective essay has between 300 and 700 words . It has a rather informal structure and the use of language. After all, you’re drilling into your personal experiences, and often, this requires a poetic turn of the phrase. You’re more than welcome to use a wide range of advanced vocabulary .

Introduction

In this part, you set the tone for your reflection. You implicitly or explicitly say what will you reflect on, and what prompted you to do that. If you’re writing an academic paper , you’ll have to be more direct and for example, say: “What follows, are my reflections on what I’ve learned about life during the first year of college”.

Here, you sum up your essay and leave your audience with a final thought. Look ahead into the future and write about how your experiences are going to affect your life from now on. What’s the direction you’re going to take? What is there to look ahead to? You may also look backward and see how different you were in the past, compared to now. “I think it’s good for a person to spend time alone. It allows them to discover who they are and to figure out why they are always alone.” – Amy Sedaris

5. Create an outline for your essay

As with most writing assignments , the work begins with ideation and then creating some sort of outline . Here’s a simple process you can use to get everything ready before you start writing: a) Scan your mind in search of powerful experiences, meaningful memories, and thoughts about your past. This will serve as a raw material from which you’ll sculpt a piece of prose. b) Consider the attractiveness of your topic from the reader’s point of view. You certainly don’t want to bore anyone, so pick something interesting, but important. c) Organize your essay and divide it into a couple of paragraphs. Each paragraph should contain one important idea. d) Decide in which sequence you would like to share your ideas. Put some logic and chronology behind it. e) Jot down any side notes included in the essay. It’s always better to have an overabundance of material.

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” – C.G. Jung

6. The essay-writing process

Once you have the idea, you can follow a simple process:, 7. how to pick the right topic for your essay.

If you’re writing an assignment, you’ll probably receive the prompt from your professor. If that’s the case, follow it diligently. This may be something like: a) Reflect on what you learned during your first year of high school. b) Think about your favorite book and how it changed your life . c) How did your writing skills change over the years? And why? Or it might be something really specific like Write a two-page reflection paper on the Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. Here, it’s not only about your personal experience, but about your interaction with a specific text, event, play, or movie and the effect it had on you. But what if you want to write an essay on your own? Which topic would you choose then? First, pick something meaningful to you. Second, pick something that you know well. Third, pick something that you want to explore and get deep into.

Here’s some more inspiration in the area of topics:

Personal reflection:, reflection on life and meaning:, reflection on events:.

“Reflect upon your present blessings — of which every man has many — not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.” – Charles Dickens

8. Learn from the masters

Montaigne was the father of the essay as a literary form. He was the first writer to use informal tone, colloquial language, and rather prosaic themes to get to the deeper truth about human nature.

I recommend you check his essays for inspiration, along with other masterworks:

And here are a few books filled with great reflective essays:.

And here you may find a huge list of 450+ essay books on Goodreads.

“Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.” – Albert Einstein

Example #1 of a reflective essay:

The misgivings about the high school football, here’s a second, shorter sample of a reflective essay:, the sources of love for instrumental music., looking backward, moving forward.

There are certain milestones in your life: finishing high school, falling in love for the first time, your first journey abroad, the first kiss, the first psychedelic trip, graduating from the university, getting your first job, getting married, having children… Each of these brings something new and unexpected and makes you grow as an individual. But you can run through life and never reflect on how it all changed , how silly and incompetent you were just a few years ago. And how you’ll think the same thing about the present in a few years. Perhaps you should compose a reflective essay and think about all of this, and about what’s coming. Next up, you may want to explore a list of the best essays of all time .

Rafal Reyzer

Hey there, welcome to my blog! I'm a full-time entrepreneur building two companies, a digital marketer, and a content creator with 10+ years of experience. I started RafalReyzer.com to provide you with great tools and strategies you can use to become a proficient digital marketer and achieve freedom through online creativity. My site is a one-stop shop for digital marketers, and content enthusiasts who want to be independent, earn more money, and create beautiful things. Explore my journey here , and don't miss out on my AI Marketing Mastery online course.