Central Florida Green Guide

I get interesting things across my Green Team desk sometimes. Today I offer you some food for thought on the topic of global warming’s impact in Florida and how to be heard and speak your green truth.

My “green team” counterpart and new friend over at University Unitarian Universalist Society, Gary Przyborski, was talking to me recently about trying to motivate Floridians to take more action on the global warming issue.

He had gone to the Earth Day Conference and was talking to Dr Sack, who was a speaker there.

Gary wrote rather eloquently about the problem of making people aware and let me read his follow up letter to Dr Sack.

(He’s been letting me peek at his letter writing — and he’s good! That’s one way armchair activists can help — UNITE AND WRITE!)

I offer his letter for my readers here to contemplate.

Dear Dr. Sack,

Enjoyed your talk on Saturday. I am glad that the commission is trying to address this issue. My feeling is that the one person who made the comment about these efforts not being enough is how we all felt in the room.

Unfortunately, due to ignorance, misinformation, and our culture bias that dismisses truth.

In one part, the problem is with the perception of science where some people think the climate scientists are trying to scare them with fears that could never play out, to get rich through PR. Whereas real scientists go out of their way to simply state the facts, and to err on the conservative side, while privately scientists are expressing real concerns about our future.

In regards to Florida’s future, the bit of news I mentioned was April 16 news: Svetlana Jevrejeva of the UK’s Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory who thinks that we could see a rise of 1 (39″) to 1.5 (58″) meters in sea level by 2100, versus the IPCC’s prediction of 28 (13″) to 43 cm (20″). These changes are almost three times the IPCC values. At this point it is clear that the IPCC prediction is conservative and did not account for the fast glacier melting that is being observed.

This information is something that Florida should take into account when setting goals.

The time to act on Global Warming was years ago, but even so now is the time for some real leadership to steer us away from the worst of these catastrophes.

Sincerely yours,
Gary Przyborski

What do you think? How DOES one speak out the green truths so the message is heard without turning people off or making people want to stick their heads in the sand?

In Florida, the rising of the sea would put a lot of us under water. Then what?

Post your ideas and thoughts in the comments!