Climate Crisis Blog 2025

During the first crucial four months of the Trump administration our class will make an important contribution to public knowledge and awareness, on our campus, community, and beyond.

Our class will be divided into 5 teams each team focusing on one area: 

1) Climate Impacts: How is climate change taking place right now?  What are we learning about climate impacts now and in the future?

2) Climate Justice: How are questions of justice raised by the climate crisis? How are they addressed? (A list of 22 climate justice topics.)

3) Trump Administration: What is the Trump administration doing to address or undermine the risks of climate change?  

4) Climate Solutions: What actions to address climate change are happening?  How do we understand and evaluate those actions?

5) Climate Activism: What are activists and regular people doing to raise awareness about the climate crisis?  Consider campus, locally, nationally, and internationally. 

You will receive an email inviting you to post on our blog, Climate Crisis 2025. The first post is due the second day of class. After that, posts will be due every two weeks. By the end of the semester you should have at least 7 blog posts. More are welcome! And you will have given over 140 comments on other student posts. To keep the blog posts flowing, you will be on either the Brown or Gold team, posting in alternate weeks. You can always post early - in fact that is recommended.

You will find many resources to support your blog posts. The best newspaper for climate news is the The Guardian, available for free on line. Also take advantage of the WMU library making the NY Times available to students for free. And there are so many other sources for climate-related news. See what you can discover!

About Our Blog

A blog is a "web log" -- in its most essential form, a commentary on other sites on the web. Our class blog will focus on events in the news, on publically expressed opinions and positions, on resources, groups, and activities relevant to the climate crisis in 2025.

Write on the blog  in a public voice, thoughtfully and carefully, appropriate not only to the academic project of the class, but mindful   that your writing is published to a world-wide audience.

Each blog post should meet these minimum requirements:

1. Evidence of on-line research and carefully thinking about a specifid topic relevant to the climate crisis in 2025 and to your focus area.

2. Include at least 3 links. Don't just write the word "here" and make it a link or, at the other extreme, don't write out the full URL of the source. Instead, as you refer to it in your text, make either the key idea or the title a link to the full URL. When the links are there you don't need to have a separate bibliography.

3. Your post should be between 400-600 words.

4. The blog is an easy-to-use space that allows you to incoporate text, images, and links, and to receive commentary by your classmates and other readers. Your post should be visually attractive. Each post needs to include at least two or more images.

I suggest drafting blog entries including AI text in your own word processing program before cutting and pasting into the blog. (It has happened that text written in the blog window has disappared before it is published. Using your own program protects you from losing text.)

You are expected to read at least 10 blog posts of your classmates each week and reply to them. Replies should not just say "good job" but join in the conversation about the post, comment on specific points in the post, open dialogue, raise questions and ideas, and further the thinking.

Help with your first post: 

1) Climate Impacts: Water Crisis Endangering Food, Dangerous Heat, Coal Use,  Increasing Dry Land,  Marine Heatwave,  Wildfires in the Northeast, Fossil Fuels Still Winning, Ocean Current Collapse?, Scientists Can't Explain What is Happening, Carbon Sinks not Sinking, Extinction, Apocalyptic Floods. Drought on the Amazon

2) Climate Justice: Africa Faces Disproportionate Burden,  Fossil Fuels Killing Children, Climate Migration Fosters Right Wing Politics, Climate Migrants arrive in cities, Black people live near deadly coal plants,  (A list of 22 climate justice topics.)

3) Trump Administration: Roll Back Energy Boom?, Natural Gas Expansion, Gas Exports Harm Economy,  Climate Denial of Trump's Cabinet, Danger of Trump's Election,  Trump team attacks climate assessment.

4) Climate Solutions: Reduce airline travel, Carbon Capture,  Global Pact to Phase Out Fossil Fuels?, Work at Night, Oil Companies fail to support Green Energy, Doomsday Bunkers, Shell Defeats Effort to Reduce Emission, Canada's Carbon Tax, 

5) Climate Activism: Young People Worry About Climate,  Montana Youth Climate Lawsuit,  Climate Activism Penalized, Activists Change Approach under Trump, Still Time, Extinction Rebellion in Boston, Climate Rally in Kalamazoo, 

Created by: allen.webb@wmich.edu
Revised Date: 1/25