Yesterday, at the GIS Day 2008, Cameron Wake gave the keynote speech on the topic of ‘Climate Change in the Northeast’. Professor Wake is a distinguished researcher in the field of climate change at UNH.

Since GIS Day is an event geared towards elementary and high school students, Wake urged the millennium generation to talk to their parents about climate change and to educate themselves on the topic. His lectures are always very interesting with fascinating, eye-opening graphs.

The image above shows the increase in the amount of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere in the last 50 years. All significant scientific research shows that today’s climate change is largely influenced by humans. At the end of the lecture I asked professor Wake what could be the motivation of those people who do not want to accept climate change to be caused by man, against all the scientific results. He answered, that those people might have ideological reasons for doing so, since all research data shows otherwise.

Oszkar

I’m finishing Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. As the subtitle tells us, this book discusses how societies fail (that is how they collapse) or succeed.

Diamond argues that one reason societies collapse is that they consume certain resources at unsustainable levels. E.g. a society may consume too much timber which may lead to deforestation. Deforestation can lead to soil erosion, and this in turn can result in reduced agricultural productivity, the result of which can be a food shortage and even societal collapse. Unfortunately, unsustainable levels of consumption are a global problem in our world. You can read Diamond’s concise argument on unsustainable First World consumption levels in his recent New York Times opinion piece.

Andrew Kun