Welcome to the new face of MIT Alumni fighting for bold climate change action!

MITACAL reps will be at the ALC connecting with other alums interested in supporting MIT. Sound interesting? Register here and let us know you’ll be there: info@mitacal.org. We’d love to talk!

Help Fossil Free MIT students tip the balance in encouraging MIT to take the lead in climate action by joining MIT Climate Countdown – a week of public events culminating in a rally on October 2, the day of the MIT Corporation’s Annual Board Meeting.

The Rally for Climate Action will take place on Oct. 2, 12-2pm at the Kresge Oval. If you can only make it to one event, please make it the rally! Members of MITACAL will be attending to show solidarity with students, and we’d love to see you there!

As covered in the last issue of Divestment News, the Climate Change Conversation Committee released its final report in June, with a 30-day comment period. Read MITACAL’s response here. Anticipating an announcement in the fall, we certainly hope this will be a major milestone in MIT’s rise to the challenge of climate action, commensurate with the urgency of the problem. Stay tuned for updates!

A: This argument is a popular retort to any cause that targets a significant component of the current economic system or status quo. As we all intuitively know, in today’s society, it is essentially impossible to bring one’s carbon footprint to zero. A group of MIT students led by Professor Timothy Gutowski even calculated that the carbon footprint of the average homeless person in the United States is 8 tons of CO2 per year—a mere ~10% of a typical middle class American, but far from zero. So while it is certainly important for each of us to reduce our personal emissions as much as we can, the limitations we face in doing so are precisely why we must push our institutions and leaders to create new economic, business, and governance systems that enable a drastically less carbon-intensive society at a scale that will have a meaningful impact on our collective emissions.

With cities across central and western Europe setting all-time temperature records, July came out as the hottest month ever recorded. While most of the United States did not experience such extreme mercury spikes, the global average marker inched up once more. The record was determined independently by researchers at NOAA, NASA, and the Japanese Meteorological Administration. Scientists predict that 2015 will prove to be the hottest year on record.

The mining of vast tar sands deposits in northern Alberta has exploded in recent years, thanks in large part to historic high prices for oil on the world market. The resources required to extract usable oil from these deposits are so much greater than “conventional” sources of oil that they are only economically viable when oil prices are high. Thus after many months of slashed crude oil prices, tar sands operations are beginning to cut back sharply. While these conditions may be temporary, it should serve as a lesson to politicians and business leaders that extreme energy sources such as tar sands (as well as Arctic oil and deep offshore drilling) are risky investments. This is an urgent message in the United States, as large-scale tar sands mining may soon commence in Utah.

A new study from MIT Professor Kerry Emanuel and Princeton’s Ning Lin calculated the risk of cyclones to cities around the world based on historical records and future changes in sea level and meteorological conditions. The analysis found that devastating storms such as Hurricane Katrina are not wholly unprecedented and unpredictable (i.e.,“black swans”), but rather are statistically predictable in many coastal population centers from the US Gulf coast to Australia to the Persian Gulf. More surprisingly, they found that significant cyclones could hit cities that have no previous historical experience with such events, such as Dubai, and rising seas stack the deck in favor of storms. Governments in these areas face a particular challenge to prepare for unprecedented events which could have catastrophic impacts on human life and economic development.