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I don’t have a proper blog this week because (a) I was doing my taxes (or thinking about doing them) and (b) I am still sulking over the redesign of the paper, which has buried the blogs and brought to the fore lots of crime and real estate and obituaries. If AI were going to write the paper, it could do police reports, real estate listings, and meeting summaries. It couldn’t do the blogs or the restaurant reviews, am I right? I hope the new editors will find a way to make our paper delightful and human again.

But I don’t want to leave you empty-handed just because I was stewing. So below is an interesting chart that I saw earlier this week in a Stanford Continuing Studies class. The class is about what we can learn about climate from looking at Earth’s ancient history. There is not a lot of good news for us afaict, but the class is taught really well by Professors Michael McWilliams and Franklin Orr. It’s kind of disconcerting to hear McWilliams relate in his happy lilt how we are all probably in a sixth extinction.

Anyway, the chart below is from 2023 rather than ancient history, and specifically from the 2024 Munich Security Conference. Every year the conference organizers survey 1000 people from each of a set of countries about their perceptions of different risks. How serious is each risk, how imminent, how prepared is their country, etc. What is interesting to me is how many of the top perceived risks are related to climate change (see red below, but also others like food shortages), and how the US is a marked outlier among developed countries when it comes to worrying about climate change. Is it because we are wealthy? Oblivious? Optimistic? We are more preoccupied with political polarization, cyberattacks, and China.

Source: Munich Security Index 2024, from the 2024 Munich Security Conference. Red underlines are mine.

The Chinese seem pretty sanguine about everything, but survey administrators caution readers to take the results with a grain of salt as “respondents may not feel like they can freely express their views.” It’s interesting that the number one issue for Indians, by far, is “Climate change generally”. I can see that given the debilitating heat and floods they have been experiencing.

Anyway, I should have a blog post next week, tentatively on how California is thinking about land use when it comes to its aggressive climate goals. Until then, I’m interested in your thoughts on this chart, doing your taxes, or the redesign!

Current Climate Data

Global impacts (January 2024), US impacts (January 2024), CO2 metric, Climate dashboard

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