Does It Matter?

The Struggle To Keep Up With The Climate News

I am having a hard time keeping up with what news to share, what news to ignore, and how to communicate in a way that’s hopeful and yet honest.

The mainstream media has *slightly* picked up what’s been ablaze in the climate community over the last month. Basically… it’s REALLY hot. Globally we’ve had the warmest days recorded (as an average) since we started measuring.

We’ve even temporarily breeched the 1.5C warming threshold that nations set in the Paris Agreement.

And yet, unless you’re in the deep south or southwest of the United States, the middle East, China, or measuring the coral bleaching in Belize… meh - it just feels like summer for a lot of us.

Scientists are screaming about the incredible warm temps in the ocean…

The extreme weather events are piling up (floods, crop killing hail, forest fires)…

The lack of ice reforming in the Antarctic despite it being the height of winter…

It’s getting fever-pitchy in the communities I pay attention to on a daily basis, and I just keep thinking “How do I write about this without sounding like a nut job?”

We learned about exponential function during Covid. I distinctly remember a YouTuber explaining viruses replicating as … little bit, little bit, little bit, little bit, cluster, cluster, BOOM.

Our brains don’t grasp exponential growth because we think linearly. So we do two things. One, we get tired of waiting for all the *prophecies* to come true so to speak. And then when it all happens suddenly, we’re caught off guard.

If you give someone a penny that doubles for 30 days… it’s not until day 28 or so that the numbers compound so largely that you’re taken aback that the little bit, little bit, little bit added up like that….and so fast. All at once.

And with every temp check on the Earth flashing fever, fever, fever… there’s this sense of waiting for the cluster, cluster, BOOM part of climate change line graph.

Back during Covid, I did a daily update on all the news. When 2020 greeted us with all kinds of other upheaval, I added more bullets to the list to sort of summarize the day’s reading.

I am considering something similar for The Dandelion Report since waiting two weeks to write a long form article means so much has happened, I can’t possibly drill it down.

I guess I’m looking for feedback from those that read this report. Would you be interested in a shorter more frequent *bulleted list* style writing of noteworthy things to note in the business, climate, tech, economic world that’s impacting our future?

Our course it is curated by me, so it will come with my editorial (I’m not THE news after all), but it might reduce the pressure to write long form articles that try to condense so much - too much - at once.

The funny thing is every time I publish, I get a few emails from people who are like “Damn you’re depressing” and even though I laugh, I wonder if there’s any point or if it’s a contribution worth making.

For me, knowing what’s going on with the planet and how our society functions in the context of planetary boundaries… it matters. I am not sure why it matters so much when things feel so big and out of our hands, but I care deeply and want to know. I can only assume other people want to know too.

At least I hope I’m not alone in that. And if I am, maybe this will become a record in time from a GenX/Millenial Entrepreneur just trying to keep her head thriving in the Anthropocene.

xx