We spent a day in Toledo, where we gave three presentations at the Maumee Country Day School — one for the high school, one for the elementary school, and one for the parents. The best part, though, was that all the older students in the elementary school brought their bikes to school and did a 7-mile ‘mini ride for climate’ to a nearby park and back. (Although, to bike safely in the city, we needed a team of police cars to block off roads.) The television news showed up, and we appeared in the Toledo Blade newspaper.

The article in the newspaper was great overall, but the reporter got the idea that global warming would only be bad for people in South America (I show pictures of my bike trip across South America and talk about the effects of global warming there). The article started with “Toledo-area residents may not notice much change in their daily lives due to global warming,” which was not what I wanted people in Toledo to read.

It is true that global warming will be worse for poor developing nations than Toledo — but Toledo residents will nonetheless see major changes. According to one study summarized here, by the end of the century, summers in Ohio could be similar to the summers in Arkansas. Summers will not only be warmer, but also likely drier. Common fish in Lake Erie could disappear, lake levels would fall, and both strong storms and droughts — such as the 2002 drought, which ravaged Ohio, would become more common.

I wrote a letter to the editor with this information, and, perhaps more importantly, added information about global warming and Ohio to the presentation. (Of course, now we are in Michigan…so we have to keep updating the presentation as we go…)

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