A good time was had by all! #FallTour2017 pic.twitter.com/C1Y03AvNYT

— Dead & Company (@deadandcompany) November 22, 2017

But my concerns about climate change has only been exceeded by my frustration with an unrelenting science denial machine that’s been operating since the 1950’s. Over the years, I’ve won some arguments, but I’ve also lost some friends. I needed a better way to discuss climate change without alienating people. I knew that the Climate Reality Project, led by Vice President Al Gore, offered training, and that I really should apply for training should the opportunity arise.

And then the 2016 election was won by the candidate who insists climate change is a hoax, facts be damned.

Forget winning the argument, it was time to learn how to win the conversation, so off to Denver I went. Here are some takeaways from my trip.

The weather is weird everywhere, even in Denver

Though I’ve flown into Denver International Airport countless times, this was the first time I’ve ever actually been to the city of Denver itself. I was treated to a lovely view of the Rocky Mountains, which was utterly devoid of snow.

It turns out, the greater Denver area has been largely devoid of snow this winter. What’s more, temperatures reached the high 60’s and even low 70’s during the day. This is a problem, considering that early March is supposed to be Colorado’s peak snow season.

We’re gonna win this

On the first day of training, Vice President Gore delivered his full presentation titled The Climate Crisis and its Solutions. It’s a fitting title, since there are, in fact, real ways to solve the climate crisis. I’ll save the details of the talk for later, but Gore’s overall message was much more hopeful and optimistic than I was expecting.

Gore compared the climate movement to other social movements such as civil rights and marriage equality. Once the argument comes down to a simple  choice between right and wrong, the answer is a foregone conclusion.

Make no mistake, some of the damage caused by catastrophic climate destabilization (my term) will not be undone. And we’re heading for the worst of the irreversible tipping points.  But momentum towards addressing the climate crisis is building, even as time to address the worst of its effects is running out.

The train is leaving the station, but you can still jump on

Coal is getting killed by natural gas, not by regulations. And oil & natural gas are getting crushed by wind and solar. That’s not to say we should be thrilled to see coal miners, frackers, and oil workers out of a job. That would be bad for our economy, bad for society as a whole, and certainly a horrible situation for the families affected.

But it doesn’t have to be doom and gloom for those workers and their families. A recent Harvard Business Review study found that these workers could be retrained for a paltry $180 million to $1.8 billion (depending on best and worst-case scenarios) for related jobs in the solar industry for an average 11% increase in pay. Think about that for a moment. About 150,000 workers could be retrained for better paying clean jobs for less than the cost of a single B-2 bomber. And these jobs won’t increase the rates of black lung disease, which are putting a burden on our expensive health care system.

Story ≫ Science

Although the science of climate change is well-known and long settled, it’s also become increasingly apparent that facts don’t change most people’s minds. Everyone is human and clings to their preferred narrative, especially when that narrative permits people to go about their business and not worry about the consequences.

So presenting the science isn’t enough. There needs to be a personal story to help people understand the problem on a real human scale. That’s why we were given some pro tips on body language and personal storytelling by Ngiste Abebe, co-founder and COO of Aulenor Consulting. There was a lot packed into her presentation and it’s clearly something I’ll need to do some more research on to become a better presenter as well as just better at ordinary conversations.

We were treated to a sneak peek of the upcoming follow-up to 2005’s An Inconvenient Truth, fittingly titled An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (alas, we weren’t permitted to take pictures). The clip was followed by a discussion with Al Gore, co-director John Shenk, and co-producer Diane Weyermann of Participant Media (the sequel features two directors and two producers for extra awesomeness).

It was a fascinating discussion of what makes a good story and on finding the right blend of science and narrative. Perhaps the biggest revelation was that at the end of the 2005 film, the only call to action available at the time was for people to change their light bulbs. Now there’s a lot more people can do.

The people were awesome, but my mentor was the awesome-est

I was told by more than one staff member that a lot more people came to this training than was expected. Evidently, the election galvanized a lot of people into showing up, and they brought their A-game.

I met people from exotic places such as Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Madagascar, Indonesia, Peru, Italy, New Jersey, and Maryland (in fact, two at my table were fellow Marylanders, one who’s probably a 20-minute drive from my home). Their ages ranged from 6 to 84, and all of them were motivated and eager to learn. Each of our tables was shepherded by a Climate Mentor, a volunteer who’s been active in Climate Reality for a while. While I was impressed by the mentors, there’s not a question in my mind that I had the best.

Rocio Criales Ananos had a successful business in her home town in Peru, but decided that leaving the world a little more habitable for her son and future generations would be a better use of her time on Earth. She became a Climate Reality Leader in 2014 and has been killing it ever since. Not only has she given many, many presentations, she organized her own local 24 Hours of Reality event which included a concert, and was recognized as one of the top Climate Mentors by Al Gore during his opening remarks.

Rocio was amazing. Anything we needed, she was there. As was her 12-year old son, Orion, whom I had the pleasure of meeting. Orion was one of many young people at the training and Rocio has every right in the world to be proud of him.

Rocio is good.
Rocio is kind.
Rocio is gangsta.
Be like Rocio.

Next steps: get out there and get after it

None of this would have been possible without the help from my generous GoFundMe contributors. Thanks to you, I have a way to present on the topic and help raise awareness. There’s a lot of work left to do, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to do it.

I have access to the Climate Reality slides and am cleared to give the Climate Crisis and its Solutions presentation to the public. Now I gotta schedule some presentations, write a letter to the Editor, talk to some elected officials, and tell a story.

If you’d like to have a presentation given to your group, either in person or online, I’d be more than happy to help. If I can’t give the presentation, I can certainly help you find a local Climate Reality Leader who can. Drop me a line and let’s talk. We have a lot of work to do and a short time to do it.

Holy rising sea levels, Batman, I’ve been accepted to attend the Climate Reality Leadership Corps training!

The training takes place March 2−4 in Denver, CO. The Climate Reality Project is providing this training for free! All I have to pay for are my travel, lodging, and food expenses.

Climate Change awareness couldn’t come at a more urgent time. The White House deleted all references to climate change from its website within moments of Trump’s inauguration . Then they moved to do the same with the USDA, EPA, NASA, NOAA, and even the National Parks Service.

If our own government is muzzled, it becomes even more important for We the People to educate ourselves and speak up. As a citizen, scientist, and educator, I’d better get on it.

However…I could use a few bucks…about 2000 of them to be a little more precise. So I did something I never thought I’d do: I set up a GoFundMe to ask if you would, well, help fund me for the trip.

You see, the training is being held in downtown Denver in early March. Not exactly the cheapest place in the world and certainly not during its off-season as the planes are packed with skiers around that time.

Your support will allow me to cover my travel expenses, including roundtrip airfare from Baltimore to Denver from March 1 −5 , ground transportation, hotel in downtown Denver near the Convention Center, and meals.

I’ll be honest – i feel weird asking for help like this. It’s not my style and this hardly counts as a personal emergency. But it is what it is, so at the urging of some friends of mine, I’m holding out my hat.

What will you get in return? My undying gratitude at the very least, but I’d be happy to share with you what I’ve learned. If you have a group or a business that might benefit from the presentation, perhaps I can arrange a visit. Or maybe a Skype call to share with you what I’ve learned, or…well, we’ll figure something out.

So whaddya say? How about a few bones to help me get to Denver. I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks!

That mission was commanded by Eugene Cernan, Captain, USN. Cernan was pilot of Gemini 9, Lunar Module pilot of Apollo X (which got him to within 47,000 feet of the lunar surface), and commander of Apollo 17, which closed the remaining 47,000 feet. I found this clip on YouTube which summarized Cernan’s last mission:

https://youtu.be/TU6QzMItdZA

Until Apollo 17, every NASA astronaut was a current or former military test pilot. But this final mission included NASA’s first scientist-astronaut, Harrison “Jack” Schmidtt, a geologist. I love the genuine excitement in Schmidtt and Cernan’s voices as they find the orange rocks they were hoping to find in the Taurus–Littrow valley.

“We leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.” — Cernan’s closing words on leaving the moon at the end of Apollo 17

Eugene Cernan was the last man to ever walk on the Moon; the last human being to ever walk on another world. And now he has left this world one final time.

This portrait of the Earth and Moon was taken on November 20, 2016 by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Its primary camera is the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), and like any instrument, it occasionally requires calibration.  It’s analogous to photographers metering their cameras off an 18% gray card. Only problem is that there aren’t any such “cards” in orbit around Mars. Fortunately, Earth’s Moon has a very well-known spectral reflectance so it will do very nicely as HiRISE’s “gray card.”

The result is a grainy image that reveals a surprising amount of detail; Australia marks the dark-reddish blob in the middle of Earth’s disk, with southeast Asia at the top and Antarctica at the lower left. Even the Moon has some decent detail, with darker maria clearly visible.

This isn’t the first time HiRISE took a look back home; it snapped a pic of us back in 2007. They’re taken for the purpose of calibrating the camera so that it can continue to image Mars’ surface. But every picture tells a story, and this one is no exception.

It’s the story of a small blue world and its moon, floating in the darkness. It’s the story of us.

To say I got a lot out of this talk would be an understatement. I found it as an example of how to give a great presentation, but I soon became lost in the story he is telling, and finally in the music itself.

Toward the end of Benjamin Zander’s talk, the transformative power of classical music, he says he knows how well he did by noticing the number of shining eyes among his students. That’s what I wanna see.

What started out as a quick and dirty project quickly evolved into two weeks’ worth of deep diving into WordPress. I’m not a PHP guy (my heart shall always belong to Lucee), but I really enjoyed learning more about child themes.

Since I promised my friends at the Westminster Astronomical Society I would revamp their website, this was my opportunity to do just that.

Being lazy, I decided to give this site a very similar treatment. I’m making use of WordPress’ TwentySeventeen theme. Granted, there are others that might be even better, but this was enough for me to learn on. I’ll probably come back and tweak a little more here and there, but the mission is accomplished. For now.

After my lecture, Andrew invited me to chat about finding life elsewhere in our solar system as part of his semester-long video production project. The result is a short, but fascinating production featuring Dr. Amy Williams, Dr. Alex Storrs, and some other guy. Check it out:

Andrew clearly has some real chops as a filmmaker and wants to use his superpowers to help the public learn more about our world and our place in it. In fact, he made a fantastic video of what’s causing global warming (hint: it’s us) and what’s different about this warming cycle from warming cycles Earth experienced in the past (hint: see previous hint).

Give the man an A!

Our final exam Celebration of Knowledge is this coming Monday night. At the beginning of the semester, I showed my students the following slide as a way of discussing the importance of curiosity:

For anyone who hasn’t watched television over the last ten years, the meme is based off Dos Equis’ brilliant The Most Interesting Man in the World advertising campaign. Here’s a compilation of just about all of the TV spots:

I thought it would be a good idea to do a very short pre-celebration recap of the semester and bookend the class with the same “stay curious” message I taught in the first class. For some reason though, I didn’t want to reuse that original meme image. And so I embarked on a quick Google Images search and boom, there it was:

I was floored. Here was a photo that just begged to be used in my presentation. High resolution, already formatted for my slide deck (I go with 1920×1080), no wording or logos to have to mask out, and best of all, it’s awesome! All I had to do is add my “stay curious” line and I’m done.

Memes typically use the impact typeface. It’s bold and attention-getting, which is why they stand out so well when scrolling through your Facebook or Twitter feeds. But this is going to appear on its own in a slide deck, so why not replicate the typeface Dos Equis used in their own ads? After all, those ads are slick! So, a little more searching found the original ad:

This photo is perfectly suited for my slide format as well, but I would have had to figure out how to remove the branding without ruining the rest of the image, and professor just ain’t got time for that. But now I could see how the stay thirsty, my friends tagline was presented. And I also noticed the enjoy dos equis responsibly message at the bottom, which immediately inspired me to add my own think responsibly message.

Both taglines are probably using some custom font that I don’t have the budget or time to locate. But I do use the Euclid typeface to compose equations in my slides (and yes, it’s my homage to LaTeX). After playing around with text placement in my weapon of choice, the final slide took shape:

I rather like this new slide. It’s a departure from the typical meme format but I think it does the photo justice while hopefully driving home the message. I hope my students continue to stay curious,  seek out the facts, and take truth over ego any day.

Then again, they’re young millennials in college, so I really hope they know this meme to begin with.

The image comes from NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System app, which uses real-time telemetry from the spacecraft to depict an accurate representation of the goings-on of NASA’s spacecraft that are out and about in the solar system.

I dabbled with this app before, but I’m looking forward to keeping tabs on Juno at Jupiter, Cassini at Saturn, and New Horizons in the Kuiper Belt, among other things. I should probably think about using this in the classroom because why the hell not?

A huge congrats to the folks at NASA JPL and Lockheed-Martin for executing a perfect orbital insertion maneuver. They make it look easy, but it takes a hell of a lot of work.

You can keep up with the mission at NASA’s Juno website, but if you loves some telemetry, get the Eyes app.

Now science!