Confronting the Climate Disinformation Campaign at Penn State: Video

Here is the video for the free presentation given on April 30, 2012 on Penn State's University Park Campus. Penn State professors Michael Mann, Donald Brown, Janet Swim and Rick Schuhmann, and graduate student Peter Buckland spoke Monday evening at “Changing the Moral Climate on Climate Change,” a talk that focused on climate change denial. Mann is director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center and part of the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Susannah Barsom, with the university’s Center for Sustainability, moderated the event, which included a question and answer session.

The Journey of Friendship

Park Forest Junior High School. 1988. There I met one of the goofiest kids I’d met. A weirdo like me but a little taller and gawkier. But we were sort of nerds into Dungeons & Dragons, comic books, robots and aliens who joined the Science Fiction club. Twenty years later, he and I are still friends. For the last three years, we have done Sustainability Now Radio together.

At this time of year 2009, the guys from Freeze Thaw Cycles held the shop’s fifth birthday party at Mike’s house. Late in the night, after a lot of talk about local agriculture, renewable energy, sustainability and more than a few tasty Elk Creek and Victory beers, we decided to convert an hour of Mike’s Friday funk show, On the Good Foot, into Sustainability Now. Our deep roots in the area, Mike’s work on bike paths and landscape architecture, and my desire to meet as many people working on sustainability as possible guaranteed we could find guests on most topics. Of course, we were a couple of sheets to the wind at a party lined with mountain bikers. It was going to be awesome.

I think right from the first show we knew there would be a lot to talk about. But how to structure it?

In his book The Creation, E.O. Wilson gave some advice on how to teach biology. First principle he states is start big. Go with the big picture and then you can zoom in. A big concept in biology could be something like the tree of life. For us, it was “What does sustainability mean to you?” or “How do you define sustainability?” I tend to like the “mean to you” version because it’s about the person and not something formal.

The End of Our Era

Our last show looms ahead. Sustainability Now Radio's final entry airs this coming Friday, May 4th at 4 pm on The Lion 90.7 fm (listen here). Cole Hons of Penn State's Center for Sustainability will be our host and asking us the questions including - of course - "What does sustainability mean to you?"

What else would you like to hear? You can let us know here with a comment here, at Facebook or  Twitter, or give us a call on the air at (814) 865-9577.

Our Home in the Anthropocene

What do we call the age we live in? After realizing that humans had recomposed Earth's chemistry and overwritten its face, the chemist Paul Crutzen and his colleague Eugene Stoermer floated the label Anthropocene, or “the recent age of man." Minus the very deep trenches of the oceans wilderness of the world is largely gone in its "pristine" or "untouched" states. But even the chemical composition of the deep waters of the world are changing as the developed people of the world change the earth's surface and climate.

Over the last few years, more people are advocating shifting our epoch's label from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. From environmentalists like Vandana Shiva to mainstream publications National Geographic (image at right), the Economist, the New York Times, the term is taking off. It's even in the scientific literature.

But the merit of the Anthropocene is contested. To get a sense of why, you can get a rundown at Breakthrough Journal where Erle Ellis argues for it and others, like Bill McKibben, respond. There are some, like Ellis or Bjorn Lomborg who see the Anthropocene as an age of technological advance, discovery, and growth. They see progress. Ellis writes, "our unprecedented and growing powers also allow us the opportunity to create a planet that is better for both its human and nonhuman inhabitants. It is an opportunity that we should embrace." But McKibben and Shiva (who writes elsewhere) see unchecked technological advance and growth as the problem. There are limits. Shiva writes,

"If we continue to understand our role in the old paradigm of capitalist patriarchy based on a mechanistic world view, an industrial, capital centered competitive economy, and a culture of dominance, violence, and war and ecological and human irresponsibility, we will witness the rapid unfolding of increasing climate catastrophe, species extinction economic collapse, and human injustice and inequality."

Whether they like it or not, they agree that humans are the primary ecological force on the planet.

Earthships

There are a lot of thing that some people in the transition community seem to really want. One of them is surely to have a home off the grid, something that doesn't contribute to climate change and is built in a way that is bioregionally appropriate.

Enter the Earthship, a home concept that can be built in any (really?) environment. And it must have gotten somewhere when it's on the Weather Channel. Come on guys, there's a guy who works for the oil and gas industry living in one. Why? Because he understands the planet's systems.

Watch.



But can you retrofit houses in the northeast to be biotecturally in sync?

Higher Education in a Warming World

Last night about 200 people came to Thomas building to hear and see "Changing the Moral Climate on Climate Change."  The Centre Daily Times reports today:

Penn State professors Michael Mann, Donald Brown, Janet Swim and Rick Schuhmann, and graduate student Peter Buckland spoke Monday evening at “Changing the Moral Climate on Climate Change,” a talk that focused on climate change denial. Mann is director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center and part of the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Susannah Barsom, with the university’s Center for Sustainability, moderated the event, which included a question and answer session.  

See images of the event here or our sister publication, Voices of Central Pennsylvania.

The five speakers walked the audience through the dilemmas climate change, climate change disinformation and various kinds of climate change denial create. In particular,  they addressed why and how universities should do better to confront these issues.