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From India With Love

December 28, 2015 DReynolds

हम हवा की दिशा को बदल नहीं सकते, लेकिन हम पाल समायोजित कर सकते हैं|

(We can’t change the direction of the wind, but we can adjust the sails.)
An Ancient Indian-Hindu Proverb

As a remarkable year for The Sink or Swim Project nears its end I am humbled to share an amazing gift that arrived a week before Christmas, a gift that should give us all hope for 2016 and the future.

On Thursday, the 17th of December, I presented my lecture on sea level rise to yet another class of wonderful children, in this case to a girls’ school of children between 6^th and 10^th grade that had assembled at 9 in the morning.

One of the things that made this presentation so special is that while the girls sat in their class at 9 in the morning, I sat in front of a camera and monitor at 10:30 the night before, 10 and a ½ hours earlier. The students were in class Friday morning, the 18^th, at the Scindia Kanya Vidyalaya School in India as I sat in my school’s library here in Miami and connected with the class live by Skype on the other side of planet Earth.

A few weeks before my lecture, Ms. Khanka, at Scindia Kanya Vidyalaya School, contacted me by email, explained that she had heard about my work and invited me (virtually) in to her classroom. With that email she also shared the most wonderful artwork that her students had created about global warming and sea rise, several of which I’ve included throughout today’s blog posting. She also explained that her students had been studying climate change and global warming and, that as part of a related project, they drew their interpretations of global warming in the pictures that you see here today.

Not only was it an amazing experience to see that my work is reaching people all over the world, but it was inspiring to see that children everywhere are engaged in global warming topics such as sea level rise. That’s what I see whenever I present my lectures to children here in South Florida, that ‘kid’s get it’ as I often explain, so to see the same response on the other side of the planet is inspiring. The girls at Scindia Kanya Vidyalaya had many wonderful questions about what is happening here in Miami and what they could do to help me, as well as how they can become more involved in solving the issue there in India.

The students also shared stories with me about how India is creating solutions to mitigate global warming, along with population growth. India is one of the world’s most susceptible countries to climate change effects, including sea level rise.

They informed me that recently in New Delhi, the capital of India, a law has been enacted that allows people to drive their cars only every-other day, based on whether their license plate ends in an odd number or even number (odd numbered ending plated cars can drive on one day, even numbered on the next). Not only does this law reduce the amount of traffic in that congested city, but it also reduces carbon dioxide emissions.

It is exactly change like this that we need to make here in Florida, and for that matter, all over the world, to begin solving global warming. For giving us all hope that today’s children will solve global warming and sea level rise, thank you to the students at Scindia Kanya Vidyalaya.

Thanks as well as to Ms. Khanka at Scindia Kanya Vidyalaya for contacting me to lecture to your students, as well as allowing me that honor. I’d also like to thank Mr. Brian Diaz, at Palmer Trinity where I attend High School, for meeting me on campus so late that night to help ensure that my Skype connection to the other side of the world was just perfect (and it was), as well as for your kind words about my work on The Sink or Swim Project.

And thanks to my mother and father for driving me to school so late at night much less for always supporting my brother and I with our many passions.

I will leave you with one last picture from the students at Scindia Kanya Vidyalaya and with a wish to you, each of you reading this, for a Happy, Healthy, New Year in 2016. While there is much work to be done to solve sea level rise and global warming good progress towards the change that’s needed has begun all over the world this year. The smiles on the faces of my new friends in India tell me that and again show that today’s children will, I am sure, fix this problem and, in doing so, make the world a better place in countless ways.

Here’s to hoping that much more progress will be made in 2016 from Miami to India to beyond!

Bangladesh, Brian Diaz, Delaney Reynolds, Global Warming, Gwalior, India, Madhya Pradesh, Palmer Trinity School, Radha Khanka, Scindia Kanya Vidyalaya, Sea Level Rise, Sea Rise, The Sink or Swim Project

Bravo! COP21 Results in a Landmark Agreement on Climate Change

December 13, 2015 DReynolds

Yesterday, December 11th, the COP21 Conference including 195 countries came to an agreement on the need to shift from carbon-based fuels and on a way to do so. This is a start to the type of global progress that we need and while the goals and limitations will not solve the problem, it is, finally, a serious beginning. Congratulations to the world’s nations who came together to begin seriously addressing the problem that threatens our future.

Conference of Parties, COP21, Delaney Reynolds, Global Warming, Paris, Sea Level Rise, Sea Rise, The Sink or Swim Project, United Nations, United Nations Conference of the Parties

Children Solve Global Warming at COP 21 United Nations Simulated Climate Negotiations

December 7, 2015 DReynolds

While the world’s climate negotiations are taking place in Paris at the Conference of the Parties (COP21) at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, a simulated negotiation took place here, in Miami, on December 5^th at the Frost Museum of Science that included 60 high school students from the Upward Bound program along with 120 students from StarBot Academy, Breakthrough Miami’s middle school STEM Program. I was proudly asked to act as a Climate Advisor to some of the children and was assigned to the group that represented the world’s developing nations including Pakistan and the Middle East, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and the Island Nations.

The program, which was sponsored by Breakthrough Miami, the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, Dream in Green and the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science was a mock-UN climate negotiation that educated the children on climate change including social and economic impacts to the world’s various nations. It was fascinating to see the depth that children as young as middle schoolers undertook in considering how a changing climate will impact jobs, industry, technology, agriculture and, of course, various aspects of the environment. I am not surprised by the children’s understanding of these issues, I see such reactions all the time as I present my Sink or Swim initiative to children, but it sure was encouraging.

Organized by Climate Interactive’s World Climate Project, the children not only learned about many climate related topics but used a policy decision making simulator called C-ROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support), which was developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Climate Interactive, the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and Ventana Systems. The children from each country or group of countries then created an action plan that addressed the concerns of their member nations and then entered into robust, often passionate, debate from the auditorium stage as they argued their position and facts in support of their temperature goals.

It was a wonderful experience being with the children and so many passionate people. I am also happy to report that working together, negotiating with one another, we were able to set climate temperature goals (an increase of no more than 2%) that, if the world’s ‘real’ (current) leaders can accomplish the same result that the children did will lead to tremendous improvement in the future. To the children that participated, as well as the sponsors, thank you for allowing me to be with you. To those who are negotiating the real agreement in Paris, please do your best to set the most aggressive goals possible and know that what you are doing will soon be in the hands of the children that were with us here in Miami and around the world. We, the children of the world, are counting on you and if a bunch of kids can come to a helpful agreement then we expect you can too.