Category: Uncategorized
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Can the 2026 Election Save Our Democracy?
It is 80 days until the 2026 midterm elections take place across the US. There’s been a lot of discussion about what the progressive wins against moderates around the country mean for America and the Democratic Party. I expect even more speculation and coverage as the general election approaches and the Democratic Party decides whether…
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There’s Something Happening Here…
With the outcome of Tuesday’s primary elections, progressive democratic candidates have accumulated a large number of wins against centrists in the Democratic Party. While much of the public discussion has been focused on Republicans using the wins to paint the Party as extremist and captured by the far-left and the ways ‘corporate democrats’ are working…
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Experiencing the Climate Crisis First Hand
I’m just back from our annual family vacation to the beach in Delaware. My sisters and I always go with our families the same week in July. For the first time ever this year, the ocean was overrun with jellyfish. Apparently, warmer waters are causing jellyfish to “move in and thrive earlier and more often…
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The Summer of Climate Shocks Rages On
The summer of 2026 will go down as a summer of climate shocks. “Climate shocks are deviations from normal environmental patterns in the form of droughts, floods, heat waves, or other extreme events that have been exacerbated by climate change” (Saving Ourselves, p. 3). While I write this newsletter, the US and Europe continue to…
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Why Media Coverage Matters?
Credit: MeCCO/CU Boulder As our world warms and many of us feel the effects of the climate crisis first hand, the media coverage of climate change, which is making heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and storms stronger, has declined substantially (also see the work of the Media and Climate Change Observatory at CU-Boulder, which created the figure…
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America at 250: This is NOT What Democracy Looks Like!
As our country celebrates its 250th anniversary, we are living through a particularly fraught period of US history with attacks on democratic participation and freedom of speech coming from inside the federal government. Across the country, the effects of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, which weakened protections in the Voting Rights Act, gave the executive…
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Persistence vs Burnout
It’s been 18 months since Donald Trump started his second term in the White House. Since then, his Administration has limited our civil liberties, cut our social services, targeted immigrants, and attacked scientific integrity and the scientific process. Americans have responded with unprecedented levels of protest. In fact, there were three times as many protests in the early months…
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Climate Scientists are Apocalyptic Optimists Too
What I learned from Stefan Rahmstorf’s keynote at the GLEN conference. This week, I traveled to Germany to deliver a keynote address at the International Conference on Environment and Society organized by the German Longitudinal Environmental Study (GLEN). The program collects longitudinal data on environmental attitudes and behaviors in Germany, which are now publicly available…
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Why Science Can’t Save Us from the Climate Crisis
source: Nature 2026 Ever since IPCC chair Bob Watson informed me that “science was necessary but not sufficient” and “only one small input” in the polcymaking process over a meal at the UNFCCC Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) meetings in 2001, I’ve been trying to understand the role that science plays in…
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A Tale of Two Wildfires:
How Inequality Mediates our Recovery from Climate Shocks A lot of my recent research has been focused on understanding how climate shocks motivate social change, and the ways that process works in reality. To that end, I have studied the effects of the Palisades and Eaton fires that struck LA County in January 2025. Julie…
Dana R Fisher 