After more than a year meeting and developing a platform, Knox Climate Watch (KCW) officially incorporated as a non-profit organization with local, state, and federal governments.
We, Knox Climate Watch, are a nonpartisan Tennessee 501 (C)(3) nonprofit corporation comprised of volunteers from various professional backgrounds such as, Climate Science, Soil Science, Geoscience, Urban Planning, Published Author, University Educators, Bio Nuclear Engineer, Architect, Physician, Chemist, and successful Entrepreneurs. Many of us are Veterans, too.
Alarmingly, we are presently at 427 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. We have altered the atmosphere and therefore we have altered the climate. The following graphs illustrate how global temperatures are rising at alarming rates. The heating will further accelerate, spawning more weather pattern shifts that threaten to irreversibly unravel protective feedback-loops.
Knox Climate Watch wants the community to view KCW as a valuable resource and potential partner in mitigating this existential threat to our economy, environment and overall wellbeing.
The climate crisis wreaks havoc across our country. Weather events are becoming more frequent and more intense, resulting in greater damage and higher costs for our citizens. Insurance companies are overwhelmed and are leaving states like Florida and California, further increasing the financial risks to fellow citizens.
KCW activities include:
- Provide educational outreach to keep the public aware of the climate status.
- Advocate for actions that encourage public and private policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition our economy away from fossil fuels.
- Provide the public and private sectors with renewable energy ideas and solutions.
- Think globally and act locally to ensure concrete action steps are taken to reduce our carbon footprint, encourage new innovations, and build effective collaborations with other stakeholders.
“A Climate Ad That Reached Millions” (from Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, 02-18-2025): If you tuned in to the Super Bowl this year, you might have seen an ad from Science Moms, a nonpartisan climate advocacy group of climate scientists and moms I’m part of. It is the first ad on climate risks to ever air during the Super Bowl, one of the top ten most watched sporting event worldwide. Some 13.6 million viewers who streamed the Super Bowl online saw the ad, in addition to 2.5 million television viewers in the Los Angeles market.
The ad doesn’t promote a product; instead, it is a heartfelt call to action that highlights how climate change is harming the people and places we love most. In it, an expectant mother narrates how climate change will reshape the world in which her daughter will grow up.
“Climate change is creating hotter, drier conditions that lead to massive wildfires,” said Emily Fischer, a climate scientist at Colorado State University and one of our Science Moms. “As we show in this ad, unnatural disasters will only become more frequent and intense unless we make a serious effort to tackle climate change. Our children deserve nothing less.”
The response has been overwhelmingly positive. The New York Times called the ad “unimpeachable in its sentiments,” ranking it as the tenth best Super Bowl ad of the year. Celebrities, including science communicator Bill Nye, shared the ad on their social channels. “There are a lot of distractions right now, but our climate is still changing. If we work together, we can provide clean energy for everyone and change the world,” Bill told Science Moms.
Climate change is real, it’s bad, it’s us…..but there are solutions. Get involved and be a force for good in our fight to roll back this existential threat.
As the Arctic continues to warm and the warmer air pushes up from the south, that creates instability in the system around the North Pole. That instability manifests as a wobble, or expansion, in the vortex and sends the cold arctic air south. This is why we sometimes see the frigid temperatures as far south as Texas and other southern areas. I expect to see more of it as we go forward because the Arctic is warming at a faster rate than many other regions as a result of albedo reduction. As the ice and snow melts there remains darker surface areas that don’t reflect the sun’s rays and instead absorb the heat. This is, in fact, a feedback loop scenario.
Global warming from emission of Greenhouse Gases not only affect the ocean’s temperatures, but change their chemistry. Seawater has served as a carbon sink for CO2 as it increased in our atmosphere, but that capacity has diminished and the continual absorption has altered the oceans’ acidity (lowering pH balances). This alters the biochemical processes of marine life and is implicated in the collapse of major fisheries and the coral reef bleaching phenomenon. Coral reefs are incubators for marine life critical in the oceans’ food chain, and ultimately for human food security. Additionally, the melting glaciers and land based ice sheets are discharging fresh water into our oceans at an alarming rate. Several years ago, when I was taking a whale watching excursion to the San Juan Islands of Washington State with some Naturalists from Seattle, they expressed their concern about the fresh water intrusion impact on plankton life and the implication this had for the whales , as plankton is a primary food source for them. As we learn more about the impacts of climate change we realize it is quite complex and multifaceted. A challenge indeed, but one we can mitigate with collaboration and effective leadership.
One needn’t leave the US to experience first-hand the effects of ocean warming and acidification – our own Florida Keys reef tract, situated on the northern edge of warm-water coral ecosystems, has declined before my own eyes due to the phenomenon of “bleaching” in which the coral polyps exposed to unfavorable water temperatures expel their symbiotic algae, coupled with increasing difficulty in secreting their calcium carbonate coral exoskeletons, plus contamination from sewage and poorly designed septic systems. I used to take field trips as a Graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1970s and the Florida reefs were robust and luxuriant with large “staghorn”, “moosehorn”, “star” and “brain” corals. Fast-forward to the mid- to late 1980s when I taught geology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and co-lead student field trips to the Keys, it was apparent even then that something was terribly wrong – the larger corals were in decline, with lots of “coral rubble” derived from dead corals (some broken up during hurricanes, another natural agent intensified by climate change) and widespread smothering of dead corals by various types of algae. On a family snorkeling trip in the early 2000s it was apparent that the reefs had deteriorated even further. I am aware that efforts are currently underway to cultivate coral polyp “fingerlings” and reintroduce them in areas of the keys to promote repopulation. I hope they succeed but I am not very optimistic given the consistent increase in ocean temperature and acidification.
When I was younger, a visit to Glacier National Park was an awesome spectacle of the Northern Rocky Mountains. Many of them snow capped and ice covered with glistening glaciers, hence its name for the Park. Shockingly, about 4 or 5 years ago, when I took my grandson to see this Landscape Marvel, we were disheartened to see that the glaciers are nearly gone. Retreating back into the mountain passes and melting away alarmingly fast, only rare glimpses were left of them. This is a symptom of a warming planet. I regret that my grandson did not get to experience the grandeur of those frozen landscapes that I experienced only several years earlier. I wonder what impacts this will have on the environment’s fresh water supply going forward?