Get Herald RSSAcknowledging the negative human impact on the environment is essential to preventing drastic climate change, three experts said in a lecture on climate change Thursday afternoon.
The event, held at Pembroke Hall, attracted about 30 students and faculty members and hosted Elijah Huge, assistant professor of art at Wesleyan University, Timmons Roberts, professor of sociology and environmental studies and director of Brown’s Center for Environmental Studies, and Hugh Ducklow, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
Roberts emphasized climate justice and the need for adequate funding for developing countries to save the environment. He said those who are least responsible for causing the problem of climate change are also those most likely to suffer climate change’s impacts, including hurricanes, sea level rise, droughts and heat waves.
“Climate change is also going to affect those least likely to cope,” he said.
Roberts also listed the necessary steps for people to take against climate change, which he called an injustice. The first, he said, is to stop doing the harm, and the second is to assist those who are already harmed and are most vulnerable.
Roberts also discussed the “polluter pays principle” — those who create a mess ought to clean it up.
“There are 125 countries where it takes over five of their citizens to emit as much as an American (does),” he said.
He also called for developing mechanisms to extend the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement branched from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, setting targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Huge, an architect by profession and director of the design firm Periphery, emphasized the many effects that architecture has on the environment, and presented a few of his projects about the preservation of wetlands and natural settings.
He said architecture has a direct impact not only on the spaces that it defines, including rooms and buildings, but also on the broader environment.
Concluding the lecture, Ducklow, who is also a biological oceanographer, focused on the debates about the existence of global climate change. He said the majority of climate scientists have accepted global climate change due to Earth-model observations made over many decades.
Ducklow said scientists have come to the general realization that if the world temperature increases by 2 degrees Celsius, the shift would affect the environment negatively.
“We need enormous changes in policy to avoid the 2-degree-Celcius threshold,” he said.
Despite the degree of scientific consensus, a strong opposition disputes the existence of climate change to argue against steps to preserve the environment, he said. Though there “are significant uncertainties in science,” Ducklow said, “there are no reasons not to act.”
Ducklow said the proportion of Americans who say climate change is exaggerated has risen to 41 percent.
“We’re not getting better, we’re getting worse — there still isn’t enough being done,” Ducklow said.
The event was organized by the Humanities/Science Project, a three-year-collaborative program launched by the Cogut Center for the Humanities and the Committee on Science and Technology Studies. The project promotes interdisciplinary seminars and research opportunities linking the sciences and the humanities.
