Ten years ago, on this day, November 14, 2013, one of the two senators for Rhode Island, gives his 50th consecutive weekly speech about climate change.
2013 Sheldon Whitehouse and his weekly climate speech http://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/time-to-wake-up-weekly-climate-speech
but then, “On November 14, 2013, he gave his 50th weekly Senate speech on climate change. The series of speeches highlight the science of climate change and offer paths for the United States to take strong action.”
(from wikipedia)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 396.7ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse had been talking about climate every week. And the broader context is that the United Nations process was slowly grinding back into momentum. In the US, Obama had only tried anything substantive in his first term. And here we are.
What I think we can learn from this is that there are elected politicians who get it and are willing to do the hard work of alerting people.
What happened next
Whitehouse kept going. He thought he’d quit at 279 speeches, but nope…
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.