Author: gbump

“It’s kind of a mess, even in the absence of climate change,” said Daniel Wright, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin. Wright helped Madison adopt climate-conscious design guidelines and works with the magically named U.S. Office of Water Prediction. “Almost all of [the models] assume that data varies from year to year, but underlying drivers are not changing over time. Those assumptions just don’t hold.”

“Very intense winter storms can trigger the rare phenomenon of thundersnow,” says Michael Notaro, an atmospheric scientist and director of the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “Thundersnow events usually bring infrequent lightning flashes and quieter thunder as the heavy snowfall muffles the sound.”

Alvin Thomas, an assistant professor of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, also emphasized the importance of talking about your emotions as a parent. This approach prevents your children from making up anxiety-based stories to explain why the adults around them are behaving differently.

“It is OK, for instance, to say to your child that dad is feeling a little sad or a little frustrated,” he explained. “It expands the child’s emotional vocabulary, teaches them to talk through their emotions, and models for them how to do this. Then you could go on to give age-appropriate reasoning. Dad is feeling frustrated because dad was really hoping for something, but it did not happen.”

“Sometimes it’s really counterintuitive,” said Andrea Hicks, an environmental engineering expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She conducted a similar analysis comparing different brewing methods, and also found pods had less environmental impact than the conventional drip filter method, and in some cases were better than using a French press.

“Often people assume that something reusable is always better, and sometimes it is,” Hicks said. “But often people really don’t think about the human behavior.”

These kinds of “pro-negativity” behaviors, whether ironic or not, have been studied by scholars for decades, notably by University of Wisconsin communications professor Jonathan Gray, who in 2003 argued for the inclusion of “anti-fans” within audience studies, or people who actively dislike specific texts. Anti-fans, many scholars have suggested, subvert the traditional mode of media consumption, wherein we’re supposed to accept and like the thing we’re watching. “As active, engaged viewers, we are not supposed to dislike, and we are meant to treat dislike with suspicion in others because liking has been characterized as a progressive effort to champion the underdog in popular media,” writes Anne Gilbert in the anthology Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age.