At 4:30 p.m. — pitch dark and raining — Sue Natali is waiting for her son, Clancy, to get home from school. But she’s not meeting a bus. Each day, Clancy takes a ferry to and from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to attend a charter high school.

A 45-minute ferry ride may be an unusual commute for a 17-year-old high school junior, but it’s nothing compared to the trip Clancy makes this week, to the climate talks in Paris. It’s an opportunity he earned in an essay contest his school held last summer.

Clancy was one of nine students chosen for the trip to Paris. He and his classmates had planned to take part in a huge climate march last weekend. But the protest and the school trip were both cancelled after the terrorist attacks last month. Clancy was disappointed — but not deterred.

“Now is almost safer than ever,” Clancy says. “Security is going to be tighter, things are going to be tighter and more strict. I think it’s safe and it was probably safe even before this happened. I don’t really have a fear about that."

French soldiers stand on the site as tight security continues during the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21).

Credit:

Jacky Naegelen/Reuters

Clancy is now the only student from his school traveling to Paris. He writes for a local paper, so he tried to get journalism credentials for the meeting. That didn’t pan out, so he’s just riding his mom’s coattails.

Sue Natali is a climate scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, where she studies what used to be the Arctic’s permanently frozen ground.

“There’s a lot of carbon stored in permafrost,” she explains. “As the permafrost thaws, microbes now can access that carbon and they release it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane.”

Those are powerful greenhouse gases that could make climate change worse. But just how much are we talking?

“I wish I could give you an answer. That’s a million dollar question,” Natali says with a laugh. Then she gets serious. “Carbon emissions from permafrost may be substantial, but they’re currently not incorporated into global climate models. So one of the messages I want to give when I’m at [the climate talks] is that the current commitments that are being made, they’re not even accounting for this additional carbon source.”

Sue and Clancy are both mild-mannered and quiet-spoken — not the type to hype the dangers of climate change or badmouth policy makers. But both are frustrated by the attitudes of many American politicians toward climate action.

“I think that there’s a lot of unjust opposition to it,” says Clancy. “People are just saying things without any proof.”

“It’s particularly frustrating because there are people — particularly in this country — who are saying it’s not real, and who don’t want to listen to climate scientists,” Sue says. “I don’t understand why you would make a decision that’s a science-based decision and choose not to listen to a scientist. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Sue says she vascillates between frustration and optimism.

“I’m optimistic that there will be an agreement,” she says. “I’m sure that agreement can be — needs to be — stronger, but I do think it’s important to have a starting point. And that’s how I see this. I don’t see this as the ending point, I see this as the starting point.”

Clancy also sees his trip as a starting point, on a different scale.

“I want to see, like, change happen,” he says. “I want to see people curbing emissions. I want to see how these things are done. And I want to see Paris.”

Clancy will be documenting his experiences to share with his school. He’s hoping that will influence fellow students on Martha’s Vineyard.

“If they see their peers, people their age, are interested in this stuff and working on it, they’ll get an interest in it too,” he says.

And Clancy says, that’s important.

“The past generations, they’ve tried,” says Clancy. “But a lot of them have also messed things up. They’ve kind of put us into this position. So this current generation needs to try to fix that.”

For Clancy, that means getting involved in climate change activism. As a scientist, Sue shies away from activism herself, but she’s proud of her son and other student activists.

“I worry about them,” Sue says. “But I also have high expectations and high hopes for them that they are going to push this conversation forward.”

That’s something her own generation has largely failed to do so far.

This story has been cross-posted by our partners at WGBH News and WCAI.

The Toxic Substances Control Act was enacted in the 1970s, but since then has proven mostly ineffective at regulating toxic chemicals. A bill updating TSCA is now moving through Congress. If its provisions go into effect, the American public should know which chemicals are safe in about 800 years or so. Wait ... what?

“Under either bill — the one that has [already] passed the House or the one that's passed the Senate — the pace of reviews will be pretty glacial compared to the amount of chemicals that are in commerce,” explains Andy Igrejas, director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families.

The Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 lists about 84,000 chemicals. The House bill calls for EPA to review and potentially restrict at least 10 of those chemicals each year. The Senate bill has an even weaker schedule: 25 chemicals over eight years.

So, if the official TSCA inventory is around 84,000 and EPA reviews 10 chemicals per year — “at best,” Igrejas says — that’s 840 years to review the whole thing.

“The math of it is ridiculous,” Igrejas says.

Most people agree, Igrejas notes, that the official tally of chemicals in commerce — 84,000 — is a bit high. The true number is probably half that or maybe less, he explains. “So it’s a little less stark than those [official] statistics make it sound. But it is still a problem,” he says.

One of the key points of contention in the new bills is whether EPA can require testing only for the chemicals currently under review, or whether it can require testing of a batch of chemicals to decide whether they should be reviewed.

Earlier versions of the reform legislation called for a much more aggressive review schedule that could look at batches of thousands of chemicals. The chemical industry and others kept blocking that effort, however, resulting in legislation mandating a limited set of reviews.

“They would still be meaningful compared to the status quo,” Igrejas says, “because if EPA reviewed chemicals that are a problem right now and really looked at all the uses of the chemical and either banned the chemical or restricted its uses to a few things where it's really necessary, that would be potentially significant progress. ... But measured against the problem, it's certainly not enough progress.”

Still, after decades of working ceaselessly to stop EPA regulation of chemicals, the industry was at least willing to come to the table, Igrejas says. Three things changed in the country and the world to bring this about.

First, state governments started to fill the void and began to review and restrict certain chemicals, Igrejas says. And the pace of that state activity accelerated from a couple of chemicals here and there to more comprehensive laws getting passed in several states.

Then there was a phenomenon the industry calls ‘retail regulation,’ Igrejas explains, in which Walmart, Target and other large companies responded to consumer demands to avoid certain toxic chemicals and started to restrict them voluntarily.

Lastly, Europe overhauled its chemical regulation in ways that started to set a new standard for the world, so a lot of US trading partners around the world began following Europe’s lead, instead of the United States.

“All three of these things made the chemical industry say, ‘Wait a second, we'd rather have one stop shopping in Washington for how chemicals are getting reviewed than all of these changes out there in the world,’” Igrejas says.

If and when the current legislation passes, we will let you know how in, oh, 500 years or so how it has worked. Stay tuned.

This story is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood

When President Barack Obama was pledging to lower US greenhouse gas emissions in Paris last week, Republicans in Congress were passing measures to ease controls on carbon pollution from power plants.

These moves in Washington won’t actually hamper the president’s goals that much though, says Robert Stavins at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The president will veto the measures and Stavins says the US will be able to reduce its emissions through a combination of ways.

“There’s going to be reliance on state-level actions, importantly California, as well as in the northeast states (through) the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.”

Then there are the fuel economy standards enacted by President George W. Bush with bipartisan support in Congress, then made tougher under President Obama. Those rules have been in place for several years now and are unlikely to be undone.

A major goal in Paris is to devise a path to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels. In the past few days, there’s been a growing chorus of voices from the world's most vulnerable counties, and some less vulenrable ones, calling for a more aggressive target limiting any temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That will be a challenge, considering that greenhouse gases continue to rise quickly, and global temperatures have already risen 1 degree.

The US signed and ratified the treaty that underlies this whole process in 1992: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change drafted in Rio de Janeiro. So, any agreements reached in Paris this week would fall under existing international law and would not have to be ratified by Congress. The 1992 agreement didn’t set mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions, however; it set voluntary non-binding aims that the world’s leaders are hoping to advance in Paris. President Obama has pledged to lower US greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels within 10 years.

If you listen to many of the Republican presidential candidates, though, they are committed to stopping agreements made this week. Carly Fiorina called Obama “delusional” on the matter. Mike Huckabee labelled the president as “clueless.”  Donald Trump said China is “laughing at us.”

If one of these candidates took over the White House, Stavins says he or she could undo mechanisms to lower greenhouse gases, in theory. But Stavins doesn’t think that’s likely for economic reasons. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency has already introduced new mandates to curb greenhouse gases — public utilities and electricity generators are busy forming plans to comply.

“If the government then comes in two, three, four years from now and says, ‘Sorry, we’ve changed our mind, you’re no longer going to be rewarded for low-carbon energy investments,’ the government would be creating stranded assets for those companies,” says Stavins. “So I think that the companies are actually going to be on board and will be quite resistant to it being rolled back years from now.”

Oren Cass with the conservative, or free market, think-tank the Manhattan Institute disagrees. He thinks President Obama’s Clean Power Plan— curbing carbon from power plants — would be doomed with a Republican in the White House. President Obama only announced the details of the plan in August.  

“That is the centerpiece of his agenda and will not survive a Republican administration. And that could be reversed before the market and power companies have taken significant action in pursuit of it,” says Cass.

At least 24 lawsuits nationwide have also been filed to derail, or at least slow down the Clean Power Plan after the plan was published in the federal registry in October.  

Conservatives have other ways to try and thwart what the Obama Administration agrees to this week. One of the things delegates are discussing in Paris is transferring money— hundreds of billions of dollars — from wealthy nations to poorer ones to help them adapt to a low-carbon future. Cass calls this a “ransom,” one that’s dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Congress.

“There are all sorts of disputes about what a president can and cannot do by himself, but everybody agrees that the president can’t appropriate the money,” says Cass. “I think Paris is a big waste of time. I think it’s worse than a big waste of time.”

Bottom-line: Cass, and many conservatives say the Obama Administration is committing to too much this week in Paris.

I asked Kelly Sims Gallagher, director of the Center for International Environment & Resource Policy at Tuft University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, what a Republican president — one who opposes action on climate change — could mean for any progress reached in Paris this week.

“It does jeopardize the international momentum that we have. If the United States fails to meet its targets, it will lose the moral authority to encourage and cajole other countries to honor their commitments as well,” says Gallagher, who also served in the Obama Administration as a senior policy advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Gallagher says international law is soft and it's difficult to enforce commitments — the best path forward is to lead is by example. She adds that if the Republicans don’t like the president’s approach to curbing greenhouse gases, it would be helpful for them to devise some of their own. 

Langley Air Force Base in Virginia is home to the US Air Combat Command. The sound of F-22 fighter jets, called Raptors, seems to constantly fill the air. The mission here is to maintain superiority in the air using manned and unmanned aircraft, as well as space, and even cyber warfare, all working together.

The commander is four-star General Hawk Carlisle.

“If we observe and orient faster than our adversaries, we can make decisions that preclude them from being able to do things. It's that ability to do that faster than anybody else [that] gives us the ability to operate so that our adversaries never know where it’s coming from, or where we’re getting our information,” he says.

The military sees unmanned aircraft as an effective and important part of this, but as only one tool in a large toolbox. Drones aren’t new here, or a one-size-fits-all solution to the war on terror. They also don’t call them drones.

“We really do not like to call them drones because that’s really not what they are. They’re remotely piloted aircraft and, as a matter of fact, it’s a lot of people,” says Carlisle.

He says it takes as least as many people, if not more, to manage that unmanned vehicle. In other words, it’s not flying itself, like the term "drone" suggests. The Pentagon says the belief that they won’t need pilots in the future is also a myth. In fact, Carlisle points to pilot fatigue as one of the biggest issues the military faces right now. He says the demand for these missions has already been so high for so long; they’ve been operating at surge capacity for 15 years. That’s taken a toll on his people and resources.

“I’m trying to supply the war fight with what is needed and keep my force ready. At the same time, I’m trying to modernize for future threats and be able to buy and fix and make and develop technology for what’s next, and the threats that are going to exist out there as they evolve,” he says. “And right now there’s not enough resources to do all those.”

At the end of the day, the military does whatever the president asks it to do, but Carlisle says decisions about how it all gets done, have to be made. “I think it’s a national level discussion of what the United States of America wants their military to be able to do in the future.”

In Washington, that discussion also includes who should be in charge of drone programs — intelligence or defense. Arizona Senator John McCain believes drone strikes should be under the Pentagon. “That’s why they’re called the Intelligence Agency, and why we call the armed forces the people who are supposed to carry out military operations,” he told CNN.

But there’s no consensus on Capitol Hill. McCain chairs the Senate Committee on Armed Services and argues that moving drones under the defense department umbrella would lead to better oversight and transparency. On the other side of the debate is California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. When President Obama called for moving drones out from under the CIA, it’s believed she’s the one who blocked it.

Meanwhile, the CIA is banned from releasing any information about its drone operations, and strikes by either agency are generally not acknowledged by the US government.

The recent terror attacks in France and elsewhere have further complicated this debate. Both France and Britain have stepped up bombing in Syria as a result, but in an open letter to President Obama, four former Air Force service members who carried out drone strikes for the US government are calling the program a “recruitment tool for ISIS.” Others argue the more drones we use, the more likely they are to get into the wrong hands.

Konstantin Kakaes is a fellow at New America, a nonpartisan think-tank in Washington, DC. He says, in the case of these latest attacks, where the perpetrators were local citizens, drones or no drones wouldn’t really have made a difference.

“I think there’s a fear, particularly in the wake of attacks like those in Paris, that terrorists might use drones for nefarious ends. If we actually think soberly about the Paris attacks, they show that terrorists don’t need drones,” he says. “Our vulnerability to simply guns and makeshift bombs far outweighs what somebody might do with a drone, potentially.”

But the broader questions about whether drone strikes are effective is a question that requires more information to answer.

“I think, as with any other technology, it’s difficult to isolate the drone and say, ‘is this effective or ineffective’ without a broader question of what US foreign policy ought to be,” he says.

Soldiers and heavily-armed police patrol the train stations and subways. The anti-immigrant National Front scored big gains in Sunday’s French elections. Many in Paris, and France in general, are feeling very much under siege just weeks after the Nov. 13 attacks by ISIS militants.

But at the global Climate summit in a massive conference center just north of the city, it’s all about trying — trying — to bring the world together.

As with fighting terrorism and the forces that contribute to it, getting a global agreement that will mark a significant turning point in the climate crisis is a steep hill to climb. But the feeling here — even amid stark differences among the 195 countries represented — is that after the failure in Copenhagen in 2009, after six more years of surging emissions and six more years of ever-clearer science and the ever-starker reality of climate change, no one wants to let this moment slip away.

At the start of Week Two an agreement is still hundreds of brackets away — the brackets being the still-contested sections of the 40-plus page draft agreement circulated over the weekend by the French conference hosts.

But the gist of those question marks comes down to a handful of basic issues.

—What’s the target for limiting warming?

In 2010, member countries agreed to try to hold global temperatures to a rise of no more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, over pre-industrial levels by the year 2100. But that target was controversial even then, and new science since has made it clear that 2C will still be disastrous for much of the world. So there’s a big push here for a 1.5C target.

And on Monday, the US’s top negotiator, Todd Stern, told reporters that the goal is “to hold temperatures to as far as possible below 2 degrees or something like that,” and that the US was working with other countries on “some formulation that would include reference to the 1.5 degrees.”

Not quite an endorsement of the 1.5C target, but an indication that it’s certainly in play.

—Aid to developing countries in fighting and adapting to climate change.

Developing countries argue that since the developed world got rich through unconstrained use of dirty energy, they should pay to help poor countries convert to clean energy and deal with the climate impacts of all that pollution. Developed countries largely agree in principle, but the devil is in the details: Who pays—governments, the private sector, or both? How much, and to whom? When, and for how long?

—Targets, transparency and the ratchet

One very big change since the last major climate agreement — the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — is that all countries have agreed in principle to taking action to limit their emissions, not just the world’s rich. That old “polluter pays” provision in Kyoto was based on the stark reality of who was largely responsible for the problem, and who could best afford to pay to address it. But it was politically DOA in the US and several other rich countries.

Under the new approach, most of the member countries here have already submitted specific pledges for action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But even with the new consensus in principle, there are huge questions about who should do how much, when they should do it, and how those pledges and actions will be monitored and verified.

Just as important is the fact that all of the pledges so far come nowhere close to meeting even the 2C target for limiting warming, much less 1.5. So Negotiators are haggling over a process to have countries revise their pledges—what some are calling “ratcheting up” their commitments — periodically as technology, economic conditions and climate impacts themselves change over the next couple of decades.

—Binding vs voluntary

Many, if not most countries here want whatever agreement comes out of the summit to be binding on all 195 members. Certainly most activist groups circulating here want that. But the US and a number of other countries have resisted a fully binding deal, some for domestic political reasons, others out of principle—they don’t want to be locked into something that could limit their economic development.

Before the summit began, the US endorsed a proposal by New Zealand to split the difference: make the accountability and transparency sections — the way emissions are reported and monitored — binding, but not the pledges themselves.

The US argument is that this will allow otherwise reluctant countries to make specific emissions pledges if they know they won’t be sanctioned for missing their targets. Such an approach might also be less politically vulnerable back home in Washington. Whatever its merits, a consensus does seem to be forming around this approach.

Attentions in Paris have been divided over the past few weeks. The devastating November terror attacks and the big UN climate change negotiations just north of the city have simultaneously grabbed international headlines. Young Parisians sit front-and-center in both stories: as victims of the deadly shootings and activists pushing for carbon restrictions.

Today, 20-something Parisians have mixed emotions as the city hosts what could be a pivotal climate summit.

Marguerite Gouarne, a master’s student studying environmental policy in Paris, said she was in shock after the Nov. 13 attacks. For the first time, she felt unsafe in her own city.

“The first reflex was to stay home and be afraid, and I really got very anxious in the days after the attack,” Gouarne said. 

But like many in Paris, Gouarne quickly decided not to hide, but to keep on living. For her, that meant planning side events and designing a booth at the UN climate change negotiation site just north of the city.

“I realized how important it was to go to Le Bourget even though I was scared at first,” Gouarne said. “First, it’s important to show that life goes on, and secondly, I think that the fact that the civil society is present here ... and that you see alternative solutions for the future, is something we needed after this shock.”

The Paris shootings made Gouarne think more about the contribution of changing weather patterns, like increasing drought and flooding, to civil unrest in some parts of the world.

“In a way, this attack made me realize that all of these problems are intertwined, and it’s even more important that we come to an agreement,” Gouarne said. “We are really experiencing a key moment for my generation more than for any other generation.”

Large demonstrations have been banned in Paris due to security concerns since the attacks, but over the weekend, a People’s Climate Summit organized largely by young activists went on as planned in Montreuil, an eastern suburb of Paris.

Damien Simonneau, a Ph.D. political science researcher at a local university, watched as a drum circle formed in a plaza at the summit site. He considers the security restrictions enacted by French authorities onerous, but thinks the government’s overall support of the climate negotiations has kept them on everyone’s radar.     

“At the beginning of the attacks, for example, the first message by the president was like, we are not going to cancel the COP21,” Simonneau said, referring to the UN name for the climate summit. “It’s all around Paris, it’s been all around Paris for some months, and it’s on TV, it’s on radio, so I don’t think it has been taken away from.”

Simonneau sees both terrorism and climate change as equally important.

“(They have) been presented in France as the two main contemporary issues,” Simonneau said. “So I don’t think (the attacks have) overwhelmed everyone, the people are not only talking about security.”

Both Simonneau and Gouarne were tuned in to climate change issues before the Paris attacks. The view seems a little different from the perspective of young French people who weren’t paying as much attention, people like 21-year-old Kevin Kaeng.

“I think people are more focused on the terror attacks, because they are more concerned about it, and the climate, it’s more about the future,” Kaeng said while relaxing at a park in central Paris on Sunday.  “I think people don’t really care that much of the environment.”

That idea that climate change is mostly a problem of the future is something many at the climate summit are pushing back against as they try to reach a breakthrough agreement this week. But in a city where recent events still feel all too present, it’s feeling hard for people on the street to ignore.

Evidence of the tragedy still lingers in the city. Armed guards patrol the streets and subway stops. Across from the Bataclan theater, where 89 people were murdered in the November attacks, an informal memorial of flowers and tea candles has been set up on the sidewalk. 

Art student Charline Delhommeau walked by slowly over the weekend, looking at photos of the victims posted on a fence. Right now, she said, a changing climate feels like a very distant issue.

“We have to think about it because it’s really important for the future, but I think at the moment it’s more important to think about the people who died in the Bataclan, in the streets,” Delhommeau said.

“It’s really difficult today to think about all we have to.”

Monday morning I broke out my winter hat. It didn’t look as good on me as I remembered. Then again, I am a year older. My hair is shorter and a lighter shade of bottled blonde. A summer’s worth of sun damage has stippled my face. The trauma of last year’s snowfall has gouged a deep furrow between my brows.

And now it’s winter. In Boston. Again.

God help me.

Meanwhile, Paris, in a demonstration of resilience and faith, is hosting an international climate summit, a rebuke to ISIS. (Unlike you nihilistic freaks, we actually want our planet to survive.)

Obama opened the summit with talk of global warming, which, to my frost-nipped Boston ears, sounded kind of nice. I wouldn’t mind if it got a little warmer here, say, like Virginia. I’d put up with stink bugs and kudzu in exchange for less snow.

That’s the trouble. To anyone here in the frigid Northeast, the term global warming is actually appealing. And climate change, though a little less seductive, is a bet we’d willingly take. How much worse could our climate get? It’s freezing in the winter, stifling in the summer, and spring lasts about a day. A change would probably benefit us. Actually, for most of the country, climate change is a pretty good bet. You think they’re afraid of it in the Texas Panhandle or Nebraska? In Biloxi or Buffalo?

No, if the climate change movement wants us to take this destroying-the-planet business seriously, it will have to come up with a racier term for the coming apocalypse, something like nuclear winter.  Now that struck terror in our souls. Two little words that evoked images of bleak, deserted, frozen, and radioactive, landscapes. But what’s the equivalent scary image for climate change? Orlando strip mall summer? Death Vallification?

What the climate change movement needs is a serious rebranding effort. Words matter. And change is not a strong enough word. How about climate collapse? Climate meltdown. Climate chaos. Or let’s go right for the end times. Climaclysm. Climageddon. Climemonium. Or we could say, we’ve entered the dark age of Global Fry, Climisery, Total Climate Fail. Or, for the hypochondriacally inclined, Dysclimia.

The only places in this country where they might actually fear climate change are Santa Barbara and Honolulu. But they’re not paying attention to the climate summit in Paris. They’re too happy, rollerblading and surfing, eating locally sourced pistachios and pineapple, watching the sun set. If you want to get people riled up about the climate, you got to engage them where the climate is miserable, like here in Boston or Minnesota. We are the chronically embittered, snowbound backbone of any activist movement. But first,  you’re going to have to convince us that change is bad.

Because even here in the liberal Northeast, we’re products of American corporate culture. We’ve been brainwashed into thinking change is good, even when it means losing our jobs, chipping away at our savings, forfeiting our retirement. We’ve been taught to embrace change or be labeled pathetic losers.

In the 90s, the age of downsizing and leveraged buyouts, I worked on a marketing campaign where we urged workers to think of change as a series of oncoming waves. We told them to challenge themselves to jump higher and higher. Yes, I produced that crap. I will pay for it in the afterlife.

Speaking of waves, last August, the water in Cape Cod Bay was so warm, the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth — yes, those pilgrims, that Plymouth — had to shut down. Environmentalists cited it as proof of global warming, but officials at the power station assured the public, it wasn’t global warming, just a perfect storm of wind and tide, that affected the mix of cold bay water with the hot water the station releases. What? The nuclear power station is spewing hot water into the ocean? Why am I not reassured?

I was on vacation at the time, on nearby Buzzards Bay, where the water was also ridiculously warm.

And guess what? I loved it.

I couldn’t go swimming enough. It was so tropical, that if I ignored the seaweed, sharp rocks, and zero-visibility murk, I could almost pretend I was in the Caribbean. Now that’s somewhere they should fear climate change. 

Louie Cronin is a writer and essayist. She is also an audio engineer for PRI's The World and other shows at WGBH in Boston.

Mark Jacobsen leads me through a maze of children's toys in his little apartment a few miles from Stanford University. We head to a small patio out back. And here, sitting on folding tables, within earshot of kids playing and mothers pushing strollers, are the technological wonders that could save the lives of thousands of Syrian people.

This is the home of Uplift Aeronautics and the Syria Airlift Project.

Besides being a Ph.D. student, Jacobsen is also an active air force officer. During a stint in eastern Turkey, he was frustrated at the inability to get aid into Syrian villages and neighborhoods that were cut off by either the government or rebels.

“That got me thinking that maybe if you can’t get a big airplane in, you could get a lot of little airplanes in ... a totally different paradigm for air-dropping aid,” he says.

Jacobsen shows me a couple of planes and how he can control them from his laptop. One plane is so small and light it can be launched by hand. Another is nicknamed Waliid, for a Syrian doctor Jacobsen met, who would rush to the sound of attacks to go help people.

With 10 drones flying all night, he estimates they could deliver 400 pounds of high-value, low-mass aid.

“There are people who’ve died in Syria because they can’t get insulin. There’ve been hospitals having to reuse blood bags because they can’t get clean ones. During the Nepal earthquake, we had someone call us that was asking for help delivering water purifiers to isolated villages they couldn’t get to,” he says. “I don’t think two pound packages are going to apply for everybody, but in certain specific cases, two pounds can mean the difference between life or death.”

Jacobsen has developed strategies to keep the bad guys from hacking in and controlling the drones. And he’s lowered the cost of each one down to about $500. After running some test flights and raising almost $40,000 in an online crowdfunding campaign, Jacobsen was hoping he’d be delivering aid to Syria by the summer of 2015. But as winter approaches, these prototype UAVs sit on his back patio, waiting for funding, partners and Turkish government approval.

“The whole idea of using drones in conflict zones has been controversial because of their legacy as weapons,” he says. “There’s a lot of skepticism and distrust among aid organizations.”

That skepticism isn’t limited to aid organizations, or even to conflict zones in the Middle East. Even in California there's an ongoing debate about drone surveillance and safety.

Back in 2013, a small group gathered outside a board of supervisors meeting in Alameda County, about an hour north of Stanford. Nadia Kayyali was one of a dozen people standing under a 10-foot long model of a predator drone.

“Alameda County Against Drones believes that the potential concerns with drones are too great to justify any use of drones at all in Alameda County. The potential payoff is miniscule compared to the potential abuse of civil liberties and privacy,” she said.

Inside, Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern was facing a larger group of concerned citizens, defending his intent to spend $31,000 on a drone for search and rescue operations, and other emergencies. He promised the department would never put weapons on their drone, but Michael Rubin with the local Green Party wasn’t convinced.

“What I hear is that law enforcement is asking us to trust them. And frankly I believe that the level of trust required to embark on this is totally absent with large parts of the community,” he said.

On that day, the drone opponents had their way. The county government refused permission for the purchase. It’s just one of many examples of Americans pushing back against drones. More than a dozen states restrict drone use, and many cities and counties have passed their own drone bans or restrictions.

“There is going to be a great deal of public resistance to the use of UAVs, even in the case of humanitarian aid, because it's an unknown technology,” says Terry Miethe, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He’s part of a team of researchers who’ve been studying public perceptions of drones. In a 2014 survey, they found 93 percent of adults are opposed to the use of drones to monitor people’s daily activities. Less than half support the use of drones for monitoring criminal activity in public places, and only a third think governmental use of drones increases personal safety at all.

“There needs to be a citizen buy-in to any kind of technology, and I think that's the important sociological question: How do you get buy-in [for a] technology that has been used in military operations, and a technology that has enormous potential, but also some kind of scary consequences?” Miethe says.

Joel Lieberman, chair of UNLV’s criminal justice department, says a major event involving drones could be a game changer.

“You can think about Hurricane Katrina, or a similar situation, where a river floods and people are cut off, and they're unable to get food and medical supplies, and the cavalry appears in the form of drones flying across that river and into the flooded areas and delivering those packages, and people seeing the good that can result from drone use. I think that really will shift public opinion,” he says.

Jacobsen says his Syria Airlift Project could greatly benefit from some clarity from the government. Commercial operators like him have been waiting years for regulations from Congress.

“The biggest problem right now is there are no legal standards or rules for how drones should be used, and in that vacuum, a lot of bad stuff is happening. There’s not agreement over who can use them, where they can fly them, [and] that’s feeding the public distrust of drones,” he says. “So we’re all kind of working in a vacuum.”

For now, Jacobsen sits frustrated, while hundreds of Syrians die every week.

Some 26 million people are being displaced by natural disasters worldwide — roughly one person per second — three times the number of people displaced by war and violence. And most natural disasters are related to climatic conditions (although scientists can’t tie a specific climatic event, like a hurricane, directly to the changing climate).

It’s not just people on the Marshall Islands and low-lying island nations who are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. South and southeast Asia have large populations in low-lying areas that are exposed to the impacts from climate change, countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Climate change is expected to induce significant displacement of populations in those nations. It's already doing so in Bangladesh.

Francois Gemenne, who studies populations displaced by environmental conditions and teaches at several European universities, says most climate refugees move internally, very short distances. And typically, the most vulnerable, the poorest, are unable to move because migration is simply too expensive.

“People are stuck in the face of disaster. People, to a certain extent, can sustain some changes and can resist changes. But the changes are now becoming so hard, and so quick, and so repeated, that it comes a point where people can no longer sustain it,” says Gemenne. “We see a narrative of sustained suffering and sustained adaptation until a tipping point is reached and then a decision to migrate is taken.”

Of course, it’s difficult to label somebody as a “climate refugee” when the forces that trigger people to move are often so complex — migrants relocate due to war, famine, economic hardship and natural disasters.

“Clearly this is a difficult issue and it’s not always easy, apart from some obvious cases such as sea-level rise, to identify climate change as a sole trigger (of migration), says Gemenne. “I think, actually, it makes little sense to try to identify and define a specific category of climate refugees or ecological refugees. I think that what we ought to do is to recognize the growing role of the environment as a driving factor of migration.”

Consider Africa, says Gemenne, where a significant portion of the population remains tied to the agricultural economy that's been disrupted by a shifting climate. “Many of the economic migrants in Africa are also environmental migrants because they can no longer make a livelihood." 

Constance Okollet is an imposing woman. She’s a peasant farmer from Uganda. Nearly six feet tall, with a stern but not unsmiling face with sad eyes.

Not at all surprising given the tales she has to tell.

“We are facing impacts of climate change, the worst part of it,” Okollet says, sitting in a small apartment she’s staying in this week in Paris. “We have floods, we have long term droughts and we have famine.

“In the past we used to have our two seasons. But these days we don’t have that. It’s just a gamble.”

A gamble, meaning no one knows when to plant anymore, so one knows when they’ll have food. No one knows when they should steel themselves against floods or prepare for drought. And she says there’s nowhere else for her or anyone else in her community to go, because it’s the same all across Uganda and East Africa.

But Okollet isn’t just sitting around worrying. She helps run a network of local groups that have come together to speak as one on climate impacts in her region. And she’s part of a small network of women from around the world who bring stories about the effects of climate change to people who need to hear them.

They call themselves Climate Wise Women, and this week, the people who they say need to hear them are the national leaders assembled here in Paris for COP21 — the latest high-stakes global climate summit.

“Our people are losing their homes,” says Okollet’s friend Thilmeeza Hussain. She’s from the Maldives, a group of tiny, low-lying Islands south of India, where the water is rising fast.

Hussain cuts a stark contrast to her friend Constance. She wears the stylish black suit of a New Yorker, someone who served as her country’s deputy ambassador to the UN in the government of former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed and has stayed there since Nasheed — the only democratically-elected president in the country’s history — was overthrown in 2012 and the political environment at home turned unfriendly.

Hussain is voluntarily displaced from her home these days. But she says others there have no choice.

“We live in very close proximity to the ocean, so the people who are living closest to the ocean are losing their homes,” she reiterates. The fresh water is being contaminated by salt water intrusion. It’s becoming harder to grow food.

And in the Maldives, there’s nowhere to run from rising seas. The highest point in the country is barely eight feet above sea level. The average elevation is about four feet.

But don’t talk to her about people leaving en masse. Hussain says her roughly 400-thousand countrymen are determined to stay put.

“Our goal is to ensure the survival of everyone… That is non-negotiable as far as we are concerned. We shouldn’t be forced to leave our country because of inaction of other people.”

But for a third member of Climate Wise Women, it’s already too late.

“My community have moved since 2009,” Ursula Rakova tells me. She’s from the Carteret Islands, in the far-flung eastern reaches of Papua New Guinea. And seven years ago, her family and a small group of others decamped to bigger Bougainville Island when their homeland finally became uninhabitable.

“Forty to 50 years ago, (our) islands were a place where it was peaceful,” Rakova says. But over the last 20 to 30 years, she says, “things have changed. We have lost more than 40 to 50 meters of our land. Our shorelines are eroding fast. We actually cannot grow a lot of food crops anymore because the soil is salinated. And this is why we have to move.”

She says others will soon follow.

Rakova has the kind smile of someone who knows that whatever’s happened to her, there are others who are worse off. But a lot has happened to her and her community. And their story isn’t over. That’s why she’s here in Paris.

“The leaders of the United Nations countries meeting (here) need to listen to the voices of the small people, because they are the most affected,” Rakova says. “What’s going to happen if 6,000 people from Bougainville in Papua New Guinea are suddenly being washed away because the king tide has come in and has swept them? And if they have to move, finance must be readily available to support this.”

“The negotiators need to put a human face on what is going on,” Thilmeeza Hussain says. She thinks many of the diplomats here in Paris, and their bosses back home, have lost touch with the realities of climate change.

“I think we should put images of people who are dying on those big screens in the negotiation rooms so they can have a human face,” Hussain says. “And then (can they) sit there and negotiate and put brackets around 1.5 degrees Celsius as a long-term objective and say we don’t care even these lives are lost?

“We need to ask the question, ‘how many lives need to be sacrificed before you will take bold action?’”

“My message to them,” Constance Okollet says, “is that they’ve been talking, talking, talking. Why don’t they act?”

Like her colleagues Hussain and Rakova, Okollet has no more patience for this decades-long diplomatic process.

“We need funds to sustain our communities,” Okollet says.

Any hint of a smile on her face is gone.

“We need the pollution being reduced, so that we can get our normal weather patterns. We need people to live. When will the talking end?”

Nearly 200 countries have official delegations at the UN climate negotiations this week in Paris. As they race to finalize an agreement by Friday, getting everyone to agree on a final document will be a Herculean task. But for every national diplomat with a seat at the negotiations, there are many more perspectives that aren’t directly represented in the talks. 

Special interest groups, from farmers to youth, all vie for attention at and around the Le Bourget negotiation site just north of Paris, trying in indirect ways to influence the outcomes of the talks.

For Aile Javo, that means wearing her traditional Sami dress to stand out in a sea of dark business suits. The dress she donned Tuesday had a full skirt, red trim, a bright red shawl and big silver broaches that jingled as she rushed around the conference corridors.

“It’s to show everyone that I’m indigenous,” Javo said. “You know, the Sami people, we have light hair, blue eyes, some of us, it’s not very easy to see that we are indigenous if we are not wearing our traditional dress.”

Javo is the president of the Saami Council, a non-governmental organization representing the Sami people, who span four countries across northern Scandinavia and Russia. Javo is from Norway, but her clothes signal her concern that Norway’s delegates aren’t fully representing the Sami people.  

“They are not, we are very disappointed of them right now,” Javo said.

Javo’s main objective in Paris is for the final agreement to include protections for respecting human and indigenous rights as countries fight climate change. It’s looking unlikely that we will make it into the main body of the text.

“We’re still hoping that some countries will manage to keep it in the final agreement, but it’s been very difficult,” Javo said.

Javo is one of thousands of official “observers” in Paris from recognized civil society groups including NGOs, women and youth groups, indigenous people and business representatives. 

These observers are allowed inside the secured UN conference center but not the high-level negotiations between top delegates. So their tools of persuasion are to make themselves as visible as possible and try to meet with official delegations.

“We have had meetings with all the Nordic governments, with the EU, with Canada,” Javo said. “We’re trying to explain to them why this is so important for us.”

Negotiators pulled an all-nighter Wednesday and tension at the Le Bourget site north of Paris is mounting as the Friday agreement deadline looms. As chaotic as these meetings are, they would be even more chaotic if every interested party actually got a seat at the negotiating table.

But another Sami observer, Jan Saijets, pointed out that this system of lobbying also has its flaws.  

“There are so many events happening at the same time, and nobody seems to know who is attending what meeting at the moment, so nobody knows who to try to lobby,” Saijets said. “So that is really a challenge.”

Saijets is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Finland and, like Javo, he has one main objective at the conference.

“The most important thing for me is to keep the winters as cold as possible,” Saijets said. “The Sami livelihoods like reindeer herding and the river fishing, they are totally dependent on the climate that we have. We already see effects.”

A herd of reindeers tended by the Sami takes a rest under a mountain in Finnmark, northern Norway. 

Credit:

Camilla Andersen/The GroundTruth Project

Saijets said changing precipitation patterns mean lichen that reindeer like to eat are increasingly getting trapped under ice that forms from freezing rain. 

“So they cannot dig the ground, and in wintertime there has been more snow than normal, and that has made it again impossible, or very tiresome, to get the ground lichen,” Saijets said.

A warming climate can actually mean more snow in some places. So to keep reindeer herding viable in the future, Saijets wants the climate agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That target is in play in the final days but negotiators may still settle on a softer 2-degree target, the original stated goal of the Paris talks.

Aside from making themselves seen between sessions and lobbying delegates in side meetings, observer groups like the Samis are hosting a slew of side events at a civil society space near the official negotiations.

On Tuesday, a film by Sami director Silja Somby was screened as part of a short film festival. A traditional Sami singing workshop competed for audience members right next door.    

Somby said she doesn’t believe these events will directly impact the final agreement text.

“Our hope is only that we will raise some awareness that … this culture is actually so close to the land, that we will all be impacted by climate change,” Somby said.

And so the Sami and thousands of other unofficial voices here struggle to make themselves heard above the din.

“Maybe then the world will wake up before it’s too late.” 

Camilla Andersen, who contributed photography to this piece, is a reporting fellow with The GroundTruth Project

For two weeks, diplomats have been drafting a deal on climate change at the United Nations talks in Paris. Most of the world leaders have already left town, after some stirring speeches that set high hopes for an international agreement expected later this month.

And while environmentalists share that sense of urgency, some are skeptical of the process itself.

There're a lot of “green” groups in Paris right now, but they come in many sizes. You could say there’s “big green” — the environmentalist establishment — and “little green,” or the more radical outsiders. 

Shyla Raghav is definitely big green. She’s director of climate policy for Conservation International, and this isn’t her first rodeo.

“I’ve been coming to these COPs for over a decade,” she says, referring to the official U.N. title for the climate talks on the outskirts of Paris. “COP13 in Bali was my first, and that was in 2007.”

Not much has gotten done at these conferences since then. But this time around, Raghav says, the atmosphere is remarkably different. “I think there is an inspiring sense of optimism around the COP,” she says, “not only from civil society but also from government delegates.”

But Raghav is inside the conference. Too inside, perhaps, if you’re a “small” green like Bobby Righi, a 78-year-old who came here from Seattle to join street demonstrations for climate action. She doesn’t expect the negotiations will do much to fix the climate crisis.

“I’m a little too cynical about that.” 

Others activists here are beyond cynical. David Garcia, a 28-year-old from Spain, says he’s completely disconnected from the negotiations. People want revolution, he says — not empty promises.

“Honestly I don’t try to make my voice heard by the political leaders that are here,” he says. “They’re traitors to the interest of the people. They have created a massive financial crisis, a massive economic crisis and a massive climate crisis. And for the last 25 years they haven’t given any response.”

Back in the converted airport hangar housing the climate talks, those concerns aren't falling on deaf ears.

“There’s no question that we will not be able to address the challenge of climate change within the current capitalist system,” says Kumi Naidoo, the executive director of Greenpeace International. “However, what does that mean in practical terms?”

Naidoo is from South Africa, and he sort of straddles the divide between big and small green. He says it’s critical that the negotiators strike a deal on climate change in Paris.

And while he hasn’t lost faith in the UN process, he does have his reservations. For instance, negotiators are squabbling over how to keep the global average temperature from rising past the critical 2 degrees Celsius threshold by 2100. But Greenpeace believes even 2 degrees is too much. And Naidoo says rich countries aren’t doing enough to help the developing world deal with climate impacts that they had little role in creating.

“So for all of those reasons, I think people must be careful that they don’t drink the Kool-Aid and get carried away with broad, general statements of urgency that governments are making. Because we know they are playing to constituencies back home,” Naidoo says.

Even many representatives of big green here at the climate talks believe that what happens outside the conference halls — the voices and actions of little green — is at least as important as any international agreement.

Steve Herz of the Sierra Club — among the biggest of big green — says activists play a bigger role than any diplomat.

“Look, at the end of the day, the primary driver is going to be citizens holding their governments to account. So we need these kind of grassroots movements. We need people in the streets, we need people voting on climate change records of politicians, we need investigative journalists holding politicians and companies to account,” Herz says. “That kind of grassroots pressure, the bottom-up pressure. ... It’s absolutely essential.”

These talks aren’t going to solve climate change by themselves. So, Herz says: curb your enthusiasm, sure — but don’t give up hope.

This story is part of a series called "Climate of Hope" produced by a team of reporting fellows for The GroundTruth Project with support from the JMB Charitable Fund.

Could the plant fungus called the Panama disease spell doom for the banana as we know it?

“Thousands of varieties of bananas are grown throughout the world, but only one makes it to store shelves. It’s a banana known as the Cavendish,” says Simran Sethi. She's author of Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love. The Cavendish is ubiquitous — the yellow, not-too-sweet, popular banana.  

But the Cavendish is, in a sense, a marked man. It's facing extinction. That’s according to scientists in the Netherlands who have been studying the deadly plant fungus called the Panama disease that’s already destroying banana crops in Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia. But experts warn that it’s only a matter of time before this pernicious plant disease reaches Latin America, where the majority of the world’s exported bananas come from.

A man carries bananas at the Tropical Nordeste S.A farm, in Limoeiro do Norte, in Ceara state.  

Credit:

REUTERS/Davi Pinheiro

What’s interesting, Sethi explains, is that this is not the first time a variety of banana has been wiped out. “The Cavendish is the replacement banana for the one banana that used to be on store shelves, which was the Gros Michel back in the 1960s.”

Back then, it was a soil fungus that destroyed the Gros Michel and now a variant of that plant disease is threatening the Cavendish. “Here it is again,” says Sethi. “Tropical Race 4, which is a strain of the exact same fungus, is now wiping out the Cavendish. The challenge is we don’t really have another banana in its place that’s ready to go to offer instead.”

Scientists in the Netherlands report that Tropical Race 4, a variant of the Panama disease, is already destroying banana crops in Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia. That may seem far away, especially if the bananas you buy come from Ecuador. But they warn that it’s “only a matter of time” before the pernicious plant disease reaches Latin America, where the majority of the world’s exported bananas come from.

The economic impact of this plant fungus is potentially huge. Cavendish bananas represent nearly one half of global banana production and exports. “It's remarkable what is happening now to the entire industry, and 15 percent of bananas throughout the world are exported," Sethi said. "In places like Ecuador, bananas are one of the top exports. We’re talking about something that is going to cripple economies.”

Ecuadorean banana's farm workers wash bananas during a packing process in Babahoyo. The banano is one of the star products of Ecuador for Exportation. 

Credit:

REUTERS/Guillermo Granja

And as it turns out, the banana is not the only endangered food. “We’re not only seeing this with the banana, but we're seeing this with multiple foods. Slowly, slowly, slowly — they haven't yet reached our store shelves here in the United States, but the producing countries are really starting to suffer.”

One reason the Cavendish is endangered is that it’s a monoculture crop. This one variety is grown all over the world, and that makes the crop more vulnerable to disease, says Sethi. “Increasingly, most of our food is grown in monoculture as mono-crops. It's an efficient way to be able to irrigate everything at the same time, treat everything at the same time. But what you should understand is that if one disease comes in, or one pest comes in, it wipes out everything.”

Sethi says it’s a familiar story. “It’s happening now with coffee, we saw this happen with the Irish potato famine," she says. "Slowly, all these crops that are being grown in monoculture throughout the world are starting to suffer from various types of changes that were in some cases unanticipated and certainly ones that are wreaking more havoc than we would have expected had we grown crops' bio-diversely, grown multiple crops together.” 

The revolution starts here, on our plates ... https://t.co/RAIUl4eRgWpic.twitter.com/FODG5wX7cC

— Simran Sethi (@simransethi) November 17, 2015

Meanwhile, agricultural scientists and plant geneticists are working around the clock to develop a new type of banana to replace the Cavendish. But it’s a race against time. So far, the fungus appears to be impervious to treatment. Researchers have documented the fungus has spread to Pakistan, Lebanon, Jordan, Mozambique and Queensland, Australia.

So how soon will our beloved Cavendish bananas disappear from the shelves?

“That’s a really good question and I wish I could answer it. But it's the same kind of variability that we see with climate change," Sethi says. "We don't exactly know what will happen but what we do know is everything that we see in the grocery store is going to start to shift. This happened with potatoes, with the Irish potato famine, this isn’t new. It’s what’s happening to coffee, two countries have declared states of emergency because of coffee leaf rust wiping out coffee plantations, and now we see it with bananas. This is something that we will continue to see happening if we don't start to take more pro-active measures as eaters, and as people who want to support conservation of diversity in foods.” 

Bananas may be about to go extinct https://t.co/7rWjKNYrmw

— The Independent (@Independent) December 4, 2015

For two weeks, diplomats from nearly 200 countries have been at the UN climate negotiations in Paris. But not everyone attending the summit is there negotiating a deal. We wondered about what young people there were thinking, millennials who will have to lead change as they live through the next decades of climate change. 

Eloise Armour, youth leader | San Luis Obispo, California

Credit:

Sonia Narang

“Every program that we did in school was always around sustainable management, environmental protection, recycling. I think maybe it’s just a generational shift or maybe I got lucky. But, for me this is the only way to be.

"We are all affected by climate change in California. It affects almost everything, our food, our water, our lawns, our jobs, our livelihoods as a whole.”

“I spent a year organizing a United Nations university summit on drought resilience in California, just about two months ago. I wanted to absolutely participate in COP21. I wanted to learn more. I wanted to be in the mix of it all. I was invited to go to different events around water resilience and water management. For me, this was the opportunity of a lifetime, to be surrounded by people who are passionate about the same thing, to be around other young people that want to learn, that want to be part of the change.”

More from PRI's The World: The latest news, analysis and voices on the global climate crisis, including dispatches from our team at this month's pivotal UN climate summit in Paris.

Sukhen Joseph Gomes, youth leader, YMCA | Dhaka, Bangladesh

Credit:

Sonia Narang

“Bangladesh is in a vulnerable position due to environmental degradation. Most of our country will go underwater. I think we should raise our voice to be heard.”

“This is my first time at COP and meeting world leaders. I feel very proud to be here to participate representing my country. I’ve met many leaders, like Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mr. Al Gore. This was very wonderful for me. I never could have believed I would meet them face-to-face. I also met the whole delegation of Bangladesh, including the environmental minister.”

Shyla Raghav, director of climate change policy, Conservation International | Washington, DC

Credit:

Sonia Narang

“I’ve been passionate about environmental issues ever since I was a young child. By default, I assumed I would end up pursuing a career in the medical profession, but I realized my passion was in studying climate change. I started my academic experience by studying ecology, and I was given lot of opportunities to work on climate change on the ground in the field.”

“I’ve already seen a lot of positive developments, and positive momentum around the world. I think this is a really important culmination point for us to chart the course for our action on climate change for years and decades to come. This is a great opportunity for us to find solutions.”

Nameaaea Hoshino, Hawaiian studies educator 5th generation farmer | Maui, Hawaii

Credit:

Sonia Narang

“For us, there’s a saying, ‘the future is in the past.’ (I ka wa ma mua, I ka wa ma hope). We have to implement the old traditions, we have to implement the practices that we once knew.”

“Now, we have to speak, not only for ourselves, but for the next generation. A lot of us know you can’t sit down and be quiet anymore, you can’t be silent.”

Shu-yu Chou, magazine photographer | Taipei, Taiwan

Credit:

Sonia Narang

“I’m going around Paris to see if there are any actions going on. It’s really time to change now, so I think we should be part of it and see what is happening around here.”

“In Taiwan, the price of electricity is very low. People don’t want prices to rise, but they still want cheap electricity, so we have to deal with that.”

Aaron Silk, singer/activist | Kingston, Jamaica

Credit:

Sonia Narang

“We’re here because we need to survive, we want to survive. It’s not even about Jamaica, it’s about the world, it’s about Mother Earth. Mother Nature is crying is right now because the earth is dying. And we need to preserve it for our children and our children’s children. We are pleading to the bigger countries that are polluting to just work with us and preserve Earth.”

Petter Bjersér, leader of World YMCA group | Stockholm, Sweden

 

Credit:

Sonia Narang

“I came to Paris to raise the voice of young people and strengthen the youth movement that I am in, which is the World YMCA.”

“We’ve come to a point that for me as a young person, I no longer trust that political leaders will take action. That was ultimately proven six years ago in Copenhagen when the talks broke down and everybody had put their faith in political leaders. Today, we believe in ourselves. We believe that civil society will, and can, make the change that is necessary and push leaders to make the change that’s necessary.”

“As a person from a rich European country, I think it’s about responsibility. I think the people of richer countries need to step up and take action because this is a human issue.”

Some common chemicals ingested during pregnancy could be associated with obesity in offspring, according to a new study.

Dr. Joseph Braun, assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University, conducted an observational study that found that some children born in the Cincinnati area downstream from an industrial dumping site have more fat as young children if their mothers had high levels of the chemical perfluorooctanoic acid in their blood during pregnancy.

Scientists cannot purposely expose people to toxic chemicals, but inadvertent chemical exposures from dumping can provide epidemiologists with unique opportunities to investigate the possible effects chemicals and other products can have on human health.

In this case, the chemical dump site and the people who lived downstream on the Ohio River presented Braun with such an opportunity.

A DuPont plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, had been manufacturing fluoro polymers. They're used in industrial processes as a surfactant, stain and water repellant and in some food packaging. They are also used in firefighting foams.

The manufacturing process for these chemicals uses perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA. Until 2000, DuPont was releasing PFOA into the environment.

As is often the case in observational studies, Braun can’t be certain that this is how the women in the study were exposed to the chemical. He can only infer based on the available evidence.

“We suspect that the vast majority of exposure to these chemicals [actually] comes from the diet,” Braun explains. "[But] we speculated that the elevated levels of perfluorooctanoic acid in these women could be related to the ingestion of contaminated drinking water. However, we were not able to show that in this study, and this is something we're trying to look at in our future work.”

PFOA is in a class of chemicals scientists have labelled obesogens. Scientists speculate that exposure to these chemicals may increase the risk of obesity or other diseases related to obesity, like diabetes or cardiovascular disease.

“Obesogens may work by affecting hormonal systems that are involved in programming fetal growth, or growth in the [born] child,” Braun says. “They may also affect the programming of our appetite or metabolism. Or they could affect how our genes are expressed.”

In the study, Braun and his colleagues measured the concentration of several perfluoroalkyl substances in the blood of pregnant women, including perfluorooctanoic acid. Then they looked at the relationship between levels of these chemicals in the women's blood during pregnancy and their children's adiposity at age eight. Adiposity is the polite, scientific term for fat.

Braun took measurements of body mass index, waist circumference and an estimate of total body fat percentage. He found that, compared to children born to women in the lowest third of exposure to PFOA, the children born to women with higher concentrations of PFOA had .9 to 2.4 pounds more body fat at eight years of age.

“We worry about this for a couple of reasons,” Braun says. “One is that any increase in body fat is bad because it's very difficult to lose fat once you gain it. We can get children to lose weight, but it's difficult to get them to sustain that weight loss, and the decreases in weight aren't as big as we'd like.

“In addition,” he continues, “increases in body fat — any increase, even these small amounts — can be associated with later life risk of disease like some cancers, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.”

Levels of PFOA have been dropping for the past few years, because they are voluntarily being phased out of commerce by the manufacturers that use and make them. They are still detectable in over 90 percent of people in the US, however.

This concerns Braun and other scientists because they have long half-lives in the environment and they have a long half-life — years or more — in the human body.

“We don't know for certain that PFOA or this class of perfluoroalkyl substances is responsible for the obesity epidemic,” Braun says. “Nor do we know if the broader class of chemical obesogens is responsible for the epidemic. However, we do know that some chemical exposures, some of which we suspect are obesogens, could increase an individual's risk for obesity or increase their body fat.”

“So we have only begun unpacking these associations between obesity and genetics, environment and other factors that we think contribute to obesity, like diet or lack of exercise,” Braun concludes.

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood

In just a few months, two-wheeled motorized scooters have been popping up everywhere. They’re almost as ubiquitous as the selfie stick was last summer. Popularly called a “hoverboard,” they’ve quickly leapt from an Internet meme to a sought after item on many holiday wish lists.  

So where did these people movers come from? Mostly Shenzhen, billed as the Silicon Valley of China.  

Buzzfeed News Reporter Joseph Bernstein detailed the rise of the hoverboard and the factories that make them.

“The hoverboard phenomenon started early this year or maybe spring of this year, when rappers and celebrities — Wiz Khalifa, Justin Bieber, Kendall Jenner — started tweeting and Instagramming and Vining about them,” Bernstein said. "From there, American distributors started looking to China and asking their manufacturers to make these boards."

It’s unclear where those celebrities got their hoverboards. Given the quick-turnaround nature of Chinese manufacturing, it’s hard to determine who made the first one. In 2014, Chic Smart, just outside of Shanghai, manufactured a board that “may or may not have been ripped off” from an American company, according to Bernstein.

“At some point, they became kind of ambient in the Chinese manufacturing culture. American distributors noticed them, and probably smart ones put them on the feet of influential social media people,” Bernstein said.   

“It’s interesting to think about how the idea spread so quickly,” Bernstein said. “An idea can spread very quickly, virtually here in the states and in this part of China a physical idea can spread very, very fast.”

Shenzhen is a city that was “purpose-built to bring the world electronics.” From iPads to drones, many of the electronic devices used by global consumers come from this Chinese city across from Hong Kong. Shenzhen’s ascent began 35 years ago when the city became the first “Special Economic Zone.” The new designation allowed global and domestic corporations to operate free from prohibitive Communist business restrictions. Over the last four decades, Shenzhen has gone from a small fishing village to a city of approximately 15 million.

“There are electronics markets and electronics networks of businessmen and manufacturers who are just totally ready to build anything that the rest of the world — and now the Chinese market — is asking for,” Bernstein said. “It’s a place in the world that is most equipped to build something new and quickly.”

Of course that rapid turnaround doesn't always lead to the highest quality products. There have been at least a half-dozen reports of the devices catching on fire from normal use — and most US airlines have now banned them from their planes over fears of fires in flight.

With as many as 1,000 hoverboard factories operating in Shenzhen alone, it’s likely that millions of the devices have been made this year. Some of the same factories that produce hoverboards have produced rice cookers, mobile phones and DVD players. A handful were churning out selfie sticks less than a year ago.

“They literally shift on a dime,” Bernstein said. “Certainly they have the ability to make any kind of physical object that you want to mass distribute very quickly."

Journalists from around the world traveled to Paris this month to report on the historic climate change summit. One Paris youth hostel turned into a hub for young global journalists covering COP21. I spent the week at this hostel, called Place to B, and over breakfast, I asked my fellow journalists to tell me their most pressing questions.

Dotto Kahindi, Tanzania.

Credit:

Sonia Narang

My name is Dotto Kahindi. I come from Dar es Salam, Tanzania. I’m a journalist and I blog about climate change and environment issues. The first question was: Why do we need these COPs? They started a very long time ago, and we still don’t get to a point where there is real agreement.

Laban Abraham, Indonesia.

Credit:

Sonia Narang

My name is Laban Abraham, I am editor for Suara.com, in Jakarta, Indonesia. My top question was: How serious are the developed countries just like America and China to reduce emissions? And the other question was: How much money will they give to countries that have a bigger forest, just like Indonesia and Brazil?

Eunice Kilonzo, Kenya.

Credit:

Courtesy of Eunice Kilonzo

My name is Eunice Kilonzo. I’m based in Nairobi. I write for Daily Nation newspaper. For me, would be, what happens after COP21, and then what does the agreement mean eventually to the Kenyans? I mean, why should they care?

María del Pilar Assefh, Argentina.

Credit:

Courtesy of María del Pilar Assefh

My name is María del Pilar Assefh. I’m from Buenos Aires, Argentina. I work at El Cronista Comercial newspaper. There’s so many questions, you know? What’s the economic value right now of fossil fuel subsidies in the world? How much is that money? Who are the companies that are getting benefitted by those policies?

Alex Lewis-Jones, England.

Credit:

Courtesy of Alex Lewis-Jones

My name is Alex Lewis-Jones, I’m from London. So, the name of the paper is The Bottom Line. My top three questions: One — how do we get a transparent and accountable deal? Because, for a long-term investment that’s required for businesses to do, we need a long-term deal that they guarantee that the regulation will be there. Number two was about finance. We’ve guaranteed $100 billion a year, but that’s just a fraction of what we need. Where’s the rest of the money going to come from? Number three: what can we do to really ratchet up our ambitions on climate action over the next couple of years?

Edna Chirimamombe, Zimbabwe.

Credit:

Sonia Narang

My name is Edna Chirimamombe. I work for Zimbabwe’s national news agency called News Ziana. If funds are channeled toward issues of climate change, how will you ensure the transparency of those funds? Who will audit those funds to make sure that they are not being misused?

Phan Thi Vietanh, Vietnam.

Credit:

Courtesy of Phan Thi Vietanh

My name is Phan Thi Vietanh. I come from Hanoi, Vietnam. I work for the online newspaper VNExpress.net. I’d like to know how can countries around the world cooperate to make [a binding agreement] become real? I would like to explore how Vietnam could learn from other countries in developing clean energy, like solar, wind energy, and renewable.

Sam Otti, Nigeria.

Credit:

Sonia Narang

My name is Sam Otti. I'm from Lagos, Nigeria, I write for The Sun newspaper. Coming to Paris is a big one for us because we really wanted to know the African perspective. Now that the emphasis is being laid on reducing carbon emissions, we are trying to know what Nigeria is currently doing to make sure the carbon emissions get really low.

I use Facebook every day, multiple times a day. It’s such an automatic activity at this point that I couldn’t even guess at an exact number of times.

With the app for my phone, I can check Facebook as easily as I check the time. When I log in, my eyes dart to the small red number in the upper right-hand corner of the screen that tells me how much attention my status updates, shared links and photos have received. Social media has become a fundamental part of my life. As an American in 2015, I am the rule, not the exception.

And yet, a 2013 study from the University of Michigan found that as its 82 participants increased their Facebook use over two weeks, their happiness and sense of well-being declined. And in a 2012 study by Anxiety UK, a majority of participants said social media use was an overall negative experience.

Seventy-one percent of adult Internet users in the United States use Facebook. Nearly three-quarters of them log on daily, and close to half log on several times every day. Those percentages are increasing. Why? The simple explanation is that it makes us feel good.

A 2013 German study found that participants’ brains signaled a pleasure response when they received positive feedback on Facebook. The study concluded that the brain processed this positive feedback as gains in social reputation. There is satisfaction, almost a high, in seeing those red notification numbers, and more satisfaction when the numbers are higher. My Facebook “friends” — including personal friends, family members, acquaintances and people in distant locations I’ve never actually met — are people I value and respect, and those red numbers assure me that I am a valued part of their lives, in turn.

“We know that many people on social media sites often present idealized versions of their lives, leading others to make upward social comparisons, which can lead to negative emotions,” says Benedictine University professor Shannon M. Rauch in an article on the website for Adolescent Growth, a California teen healthcare center.

I’ve experienced my share of this drawback of social media. Even as I’m happy for a friend who got a new job, or got married, or had a baby, I often find myself vaguely resentful of their accomplishments. Sometimes it seems like they’re rubbing their hyperidealized lives in my face, provoking feelings of inferiority and inadequacy by comparison.

But despite these negative effects, recent research indicates that social media can actually be a positive force if properly managed. James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego was lead author of a 2014 report that suggests social media can be harnessed to spread happiness through a ripple effect. The report found that positive Facebook status updates tend to lead to other, similar statuses. Fowler proposes that this effect could potentially be cultivated to create what he calls “an epidemic of well-being.”

For teenagers and young adults whose high levels of social media consumption are often used to portray them as born narcissists, the benefits can be even more dramatic. In 2010, researchers at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia determined that social networking sites can positively impact adolescents who go online because they’re lonely. These teens can find intimacy and social anxiety relief through online communication, which protects them from feelings of shame that limit their ability to express themselves.

Instead of using online platforms as their own personal spotlights, many kids are using social media to reach out, to form bonds, and to try to find their place in the lives of others. Instead of seeking praise, they are seeking community.

This has been the key distinction in improving my own relationship with social media. I find happiness in community, and in many ways, social media has become that community, the first place I go every day for human connection. In part, this is a function of moving to a new city and leaving 30 years’ worth of in-person relationships behind. I’ve found new people to interact with, of course, but I’ve also maintained connections with people I would otherwise have fallen out of touch with.

At the same time, I’ve expanded my personal community to include people whose faces I could only recognize from profile pictures. I’ve been invited to parties and protests that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about. I’ve found opportunities to advance both my career and my creative endeavors.

And others have embraced the possibility of an online community to even greater degrees. I’ve seen people turn to social media for help on every level, from asking friends to assist in a move, to seeking support for the revelation of a sexual orientation or an eating disorder. It doesn’t replace individual relationships, but it does facilitate increased connection with a broader group of people.

When I’m having a bad day, I use my phone to call a close friend or a parent. When I need to reach out to the larger network I’ve developed over the years, I use my phone to log on to Facebook.

Social media becomes emotionally unhealthy when we see it as a source of individual validation instead of a structure for community growth. The same can be said of our in-person interactions. As we work to maintain the health of our communities, it’s important to include online networks in our endeavors. This technology is not going away, and while it has intrinsic biases like any medium, its overall effects depend entirely on how it’s applied.

Our responsibility is to foster a healthy relationship with social media by examining and understanding it in communal terms, while maintaining a balance between the digital and analog methods of experiencing the world.

Finding that balance is a constant struggle, and I would never claim to have achieved it myself. But I have learned to look at the trials and successes of the people who comprise my Facebook feed not as standards of measurement by which to judge myself, but as sources of connection and inspiration.

The little red notification numbers in the upper right hand corner of the screen pale in importance against the platform as a whole — the living and changing network of digital relationships that is rapidly becoming the modern community.

Miles Schneiderman is a contributor to YES! Magazine. This story was originally published by YES!, a nonprofit publication that supports people’s active engagement in solving today’s social, political, and environmental challenges. 

When traveling by train in South Korea, you can’t go any further north than Baekmagoji Station. It’s then a 15-minute walk from the station to the demilitarized zone (or DMZ). After that, it’s all rice paddies and landmines, leading up to North Korea.

Even though the two Koreas signed a cease-fire agreement back in 1953, shots are still fired across the border. And according to Seoul’s Ministry of National Defense, Pyongyang dispatches drones over the DMZ, too.

In September, military officials here reported that they spotted a North Korean drone in South Korean territory. A helicopter and fighter jet were scrambled to intercept it, but the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) got away.

Others haven’t made it back. Since 2014, the Defense Ministry says it has recovered four crashed North Korean drones.

Martyn Williams, who runs the North Korea Tech blog, believes these aircraft were on a recon mission.

“It looks like they were flying into South Korea to take photographs of the border area, which is where, of course, South Korea and the United States have a lot of troops and a lot of military equipment,” he says. “They did have these rather expensive digital cameras on board, probably cameras that cost about several thousand dollars.”

But it’s not only the border that North Korean drones have flown over. The Defense Ministry says at least one of these UAVs made it all the way to downtown Seoul.

Local media went into panic mode. On the front page of one paper was a picture taken from the seized drone. The headline said it was just 20 seconds away from the President’s house. This part of town is also home to the American Embassy and the US Ambassador’s residence.

I’ve seen two of these drones in person. They’re painted sky blue with wingspans of about 6 and 8 feet. One was airplane-shaped, the other a glider.

Boo Hyung-wook, a researcher at the government-affiliated Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, has seen the UAVs too. He says they’re primitive, the kind you can make with open-source technology. But he says the Defense Ministry believes these aren’t the only type of drones that North Korea possesses.

According to Boo, they have 320 drones and 10 of them are American-made. That includes the Raytheon Streaker, a target drone that was first made in the 1970s and is no longer in production. Pyongyang is believed to have acquired those from Syria.

Boo says the regime uses these old American, as well as Russian drones, as models to make its own modified UAVs — like the ones seen in the Pyongyang military parade. He says they’re designed to carry one kilogram, or about two pounds, of TNT.

But that’s not his biggest concern.

“What if they can carry chemical weapons?” he says, pointing out that one kilogram of anthrax could kill up to 10,000 people.

That scenario is still a ways off, according to long-time North Korea watcher Joseph Bermudez, chief analytics officer at All Source Analysis in Longmont, Colorado.

He says for now it doesn’t seem that North Korea’s drones are capable of relaying real-time images back to base or flying far distances. But the US and South Korean militaries would have a problem on their hands if Pyongyang were to acquire the technology to do so from allies like China or Iran.

Bermudez says Washington is more concerned with North Korea’s nuclear weapons and long-range missile programs than its drones. Plus, there’s no foolproof way for the US or South Korea to prevent Pyongyang’s surveillance UAVs from infiltrating southern airspace. He says it would take a combination of better intel, radar systems, and weaponry.

The South Korean military has its own plan. It’s contracted with a local university to develop technology that could be used for a fleet of attack drones.

The attack drone developed at KAIST in South Korea. It's an early prototype that one day might fight drones from North Korea.

Credit:

Malte Kollenberg

A soccer field at the science and technology graduate school KAIST is where Shim Hyun-chul, head of the unmanned systems research group, and his students are testing their quad-rotor UAV.

One attack drone works in tandem with another UAV. They detect the enemy aircraft, which is hovering on the opposite side of the field, and go after it together. The smaller of the two releases a nylon net over the enemy drone in mid air. The net gets caught in the rotors and it crashes to the ground. The second drone then delivers its payload — a small vehicle that picks up the fallen UAV and brings it back to base.

Shim says neutralizing drones with other drones could be the safest way to combat invading North Korean UAVs. Many other methods, like using bullets or lasers, wouldn’t be safe in densely populated areas. The Seoul metropolitan area is less than 40-miles south of the DMZ and is home to about 25 million inhabitants.

Defense analyst Boo Hyung-wook says that if fighting were to ever break out here, drones could be at the forefront on both sides. And because urban warfare is so complex, they would need drones of all sizes, from the very large, to the very, very tiny.

And as more North Korean drones make it across the border, or are put on parade, Boo says South Korean and American forces need to bolster their UAV programs faster than North Korea enhances its own.

Improv is something you expect to find on Saturday Night Live, not in the science lab. A couple of acting teachers, however, are beginning to introduce improv acting and communication techniques to the science syllabus. “JRN 503: Improvisation for Scientists” is a course now on offer at New York’s Stony Brook University.

Alan Alda is an actor, director, screenwriter and board member for the World Science Festival. He’s also one of the people behind the new improv class for scientists at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York.

“This basic kind of improv is not where you try to turn the scientist into a comedian or an actor,” Alda says. “It's not a jokey kind of humor. It’s the pleasure of spontaneity, so that if something occurs to you in that split second, it’s free to come out. You trusted it, you trust yourself, and the audience is delighted.”

The improv classes are aimed at helping scientists think and communicate more personally and in a more relatable way, explains Valeri Lantz-Gefroh, improvisation program director at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University.

“A lot of it is just about learning how to listen and be available to whatever's right in front of you,” Lantz-Gefroh says. “The tool that they learn in improv is that, if that's not working, they need to be aware of the fact that it's not working, and able to make an adjustment on their feet, not feel like they failed. ... So the games that we play are a lot about just listening, availability and being able to make spontaneous adjustments and also bring their own passion to the moment so that they're coming from a place of excitement in their own work”

Alda and Lantz-Gefroh say the classes have yielded exciting results for science and medical students. 

One medical student used his improv training from a game called ‘Mirror Exercise’ that teaches students to slow down, be more simple and empathetic. He had an encounter with a patient to whom he had to break bad news. He had to tell her that her cancer had metastasized and she had only two weeks left to live. He was terrified going into the conversation. 

At first the woman had no reaction at all to the news. He had the feeling she didn't understand what was happening, so he decided to use some of his improv training. 

“He said, ‘I sat down with her and we held hands. ... I told her in the simplest possible way what was happening. I didn't use any three-syllable words. I didn't use the word ‘metastasis,’ I didn't use the word ‘prognosis.’ I just tried to be simple and slow because I knew that there was a pacing to the way that you could hear this information.’ And he said ‘For the first time, the woman started to cry.’ And when she cried, it made him cry, and then when he cried she had a question,” Lantz-Gefroh says. “He said ‘What I felt happened was that I was able to help her understand how to understand the end of her life. And she was able to help me understand how to be a better doctor.’”

Other students say the improv classes have helped them better understand their own scientific work. 

“These are senior scientists very often. And after going through this training with us, they get so used to thinking in basic language, and facing the concepts without over-intellectualizing them that they have a greater understanding of their own work,” Alda says. “That's a wonderful thing — they can actually make more progress in their work because they see it in a fresher way. One scientist told me he doesn’t face the data in a way where he tells the data something. He lets the data talk to him.”

Others find the improv classes help them get through school. 

“Our medical students have told us that they're actually learning material easier because, as it's being given to them, they're starting to distill it in their own minds and think ‘If I was to say this in plain language, what would it be?’ And it's helping it to stick with them longer,” Lantz-Gefroh says. 

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday.