In some places, climate change is an explicit factor driving a city’s action; such is the case in Baltimore, Maryland, which has a Climate Action Plan and a recently appointed “Hazard Mitigation and Adaptation Planner” who is trying to build more tree canopy in the city’s neighborhoods so that residents may benefit from increased shade during heat waves. In addition to combating the “urban heat island effect” (increased canopy can cool the city by up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit), planting more trees has a host of other benefits: increasing property values and decreasing crime, according to Goldstein. These “co-benefits” were observed all around the country, Goldstein says, pointing out that sometimes “responding to climate change” is a co-benefit in itself, tertiary to the main goal of attracting tourists or reducing crime.

“When we started this trip,” says Goldstein, “someone told us we wouldn’t find anyone to talk to about climate change in the south.” That prediction proved false. “There are definitely people who are still skeptical of the science or don’t really believe that the impacts of climate change will come to their community in particular, but in general we found that this kind of politicized, black and white, ‘believe or don’t believe’ thing that’s presented in the news a lot is really a lot more nuanced than that.”

On the coast of North Carolina, they met Tom Thompson, the Chairman of the Board of NC-20, a conservative organization that Stephen Colbert poked fun at in 2012. Thompson may be “skeptical” of projections of a 39-inch sea-level rise in his area, but his objection to the plans to prepare for it — elevating homes, raising flood insurance rates – has more to do with his concerns about impoverishing the community, Goldstein and Howard write on their blog. “My view of the world,” he tells them, "is as someone who has seen a lot of poverty … I just love this area and I want to protect it.”

Goldstein and Howard have also talked to Colorado fruit growers who are adapting to fluctuations in temperature without necessarily agreeing on the cause of the changes. “The farmers we spoke with, for the most part,” they write, “aren’t attributing the longer growing season to climate change.” The farmers view fluctuating weather patterns as normal. But in response to the latest variations, they are diversifying their harvests in anticipation of losing some crops each season, and using wind machines to nudge the air temperatures in the fields by half degrees to prevent freezing.

Howard tells me she was “amazed by the number of places where at the municipal level they had some sort of effort to actually identify their climate variability and predict what the local impact to their communities would be.” The great takeaway from this project, she says, seems to be that “people are really in touch with ‘their place.’” Even if they aren’t concerned about climate change on a global scale or they think it doesn’t affect them, “once you get down to talking about their neighborhoods, their cities, they know so much… and are, in a lot of cases, working really hard to make it the best place to live.”