As 2022 dawns, I look back on 2021 with gratitude & amazement. We came so far – I did and Climate Companion did. I’m guessing you did as well, and I’m grateful to be in the climate fight with you. You played a role in moving me and Climate Companion forward, and I thank you. In this blog post, I outline what we learned and accomplished in 2021 and provide a glimpse of our goals for 2022.
Climate Companion Blog Posts
A few weeks ago, I was the “speaker” for the Lean Culture Meetup, interviewed by Sean Murphy. I shared a bit about how Climate Companion got started, skills that founders need, and tips such as taking a customer discovery mindset. Here is a link to the video. Please enjoy and share your reactions in the comments.
The 50th Anniversary of the first Earth Day is this week, on April 22. The idea of the original Earth Day was that human health and planetary health are tightly linked: to protect one, we must protect the other. What might our planet be like 50 years from now, on the 100th Anniversary? In this post, I’m putting out my vision of that 2070 future, and some steps we can take now to get there, even in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis.
As long-time readers of this blog know, the Drawdown project and book were my inspiration for starting this blog. The blog’s original name even included the word Drawdown (+ Data Science). Even while running my new company, I keep an eye on Drawdown. I heard their Executive Director Jonathan Foley speak some months back, so I knew that a new version of Drawdown was coming. In this post, I aim to spread the word on the new version and summarize the changes.
Bringing…people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve the problems we face, before it’s too late. Our goal must be to find a new way of unleashing our collective intelligence…
Al Gore, The Assault on Reason: Our Information Ecosystem, from the Age of Print to the Era of Trump. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017
My awareness of the dangers of climate change and my intention to act started when I saw An Inconvenient Truth, Thus, quoting Al Gore seems perfect today, as I announce the next chapter in my journey to reverse global warming. I’ve been talking for many years with friends and associates about what we can do about climate change. Then about 19 months ago, I quit my job to focus on contributing to climate change solutions, and started this blog in January.
Several months ago, my message about climate change started really hitting home with my friend and prior collaborator Darla Hewett. Darla is an amazing data engineer who has helped practitioners in multiple industries increase their effectiveness. Some of the technologies she uses resonated with and have been inspired by Doug Engelbart.
After some discussion, Darla and I decided to start a new initiative together, focusing on solutions to climate change. This post tells our origin story – read on the learn more.
One of the reasons I started this blog was to practice talking more about global warming, and about actions I’m taking to reverse it. I hope that by doing this I can educate and inspire others to also act, and encourage and support those who are also already doing what they can. This crisis needs all hands on deck, and a diverse set of solutions.
Along the way, I’ve been inspired by the youth climate movement, starting most recently with Greta Thunberg’s school strikes and her wonderful speech at the UN Climate Change Conference last year. I agree with her and many others that the more we talk about and make visible the crisis, the easier it will be to continue to reverse it. Later this week, we all have a chance to take a stand, by participating in the Global Climate Strike. The youth have invited everyone to join them in striking on Friday September 20 and 27. As the web page says, “This is a global moment to show politicians everywhere that our movement is growing from strength to strength and we won’t stop until we get climate justice for everyone.”
I’ve been thinking about food waste a lot lately. Why? It started when I perused Drawdown’s list of top solutions to global warming. Reduced food waste is ranked third, and it’s the highest ranked solution that almost anyone can take action on. But before we can take action, we need to be informed. This post seeks to do so, empowering you to take part in the conversation that needs to happen to solve this gnarly problem!
In mid-March I attended a talk organized by the ClimateLink SF Meetup, titled “Rise of the Machines: AI for Energy Management.” The three presenters were Daniel Lim, Co-Founder at Crocus Energy, Pratik Parekh, Sr. Data Scientist and PM at Bidgely, and Andrew Byrnes, Investment Director with Comet Labs. In this post, I’ll summarize the main points of the talks and their connections to data science.
We’ve been exploring a problem in image classification applicable to land use management. This is the fourth and final post in a series that also illustrates the application of the CRISP-DM framework. For the more technical portions of this post, I again give huge kudos to Fast.ai for their technology and courses. Here is the Kaggle notebook1 that goes with this post. Note that fast.ai is a fast-moving library, and some of the functions have changed since my last post; so that code does not fully work anymore!
As I mentioned at the end of the last post, there are many opportunities to improve the model. Some of these are explained in fast.ai lessons 1 and 3, and many more are mentioned in Kaggle forums. I’m not covering those here, but mention a few possibilities briefly.
As the effects of global warming increase in severity, many of us understandably want action. Multiple organizations focus on climate change communication and persuading people to act. But in many ways, this effort has hit a wall: the percentage of Americans who think that global warming is happening has held steady over the past two years, at around 70%. Furthermore, belief does not always incite action. How can we speed up progress in persuading people to act?
What if we take another communication approach? What if we communicate about a topic less likely to face the challenges faced by focusing on climate change? What if we do not even mention global warming or climate change? Why would we make this change in our communications strategy? Because if people act on it as a result, we also contribute to reversing global warming. The topic I’m referring to is simple living.