Written December, 2012
The differential susceptibility of peoples around the world to climate change warrants an ethical discussion. We need to identify effective and safe ways to help people deal with the effects of climate change, as well as learn to manage and manipulate wild species and nature in order to preserve biodiversity. Some of these adaptation strategies might be highly technical (e.g. building sea walls to stem off sea level rise), but others are social and cultural (e.g., changing agricultural practices).
It will likely be too expensive to adapt to climate change everywhere, protecting all peoples and creatures, but figuring out where, how, and when to implement adaptation strategies is a major challenge for natural and social scientists. Grappling with what climate change and climate change adaptation means for humanity and our role in nature is a major challenge for humanists.
In April, the University of Notre Dame hosted a conference called Climate Change and the Common Good: Security, Sustainability, Policy. The multidisciplinary conference explored the challenges and opportunities society faces in addressing climate change and resource scarcity and brought together scientists, ethicists, policyexperts, theologians, and national security experts. Videos from the conference are now online. Click below for more details:
In order to help readers understand the nature of climate change as well as
various adaptation strategies, we have compiled the resources below:
Notre Dame Resources:
Climate Change Adaptation (from the Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative) See video here.
Professor Jessica Hellmann’s blog Adapting Nature to Climate Change
Climate Change and the Common Good conference (Notre Dame, April 8-10, 2013)
The Collaboratory for Adaptation to Climate Change
Prof. Jessica Hellmann’s Reilly Forum talk on “Fixing the global commons: what humans can and should do to help nature live and thrive through climate change”
Government Websites:
AAAS Global Climate Change Resources
Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Climate Change Resources
Federal Advisory Committee Draft Climate Assessment Report Released for Public Review
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
NASA’s Climate Change Resource Reel
NASA Innovations in Climate Change
National Climatic Data Center, Resources and Outreach
USDA Climate Change Resource Center
US Global Change Research Program’s Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Change
Books:
Click here for reading suggestions from Catholic Climate Covenant
Clicking on the book titles below will take you to the Amazon.com page for those books.
- The Warming Papers: The Scientific Foundation for the Climate Change Forecast, eds. David Archer and Ray Pierrehumbert
- A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change, by Stephen M. Gardiner (2011)
- Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, by Elizabeth Kolbert (2006)
- Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas (2008)
- The Global Warming Reader: A Century of Writing About Climate Change, by Bill McKibben (2012)
- Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (2011)
- The Discovery of Global Warming, by Spencer Weart (2008)
Social Media:
Twitter:
ND Climate Conference @ClimateND
ND Environmental Change Initiative @ND_ECI
ND Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values @NDReillyCenter
ND Biology Professor Jessica Hellmann @JessicaHellmann
Andrew Revkin @Revkin
Catholic Climate Covenant @CatholicClimate
Climate Progress @climateprogress
Union of Concerned Scientists @UCSUSA
Facebook:
Official Event page for Climate Change and the Common Good conference
Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative
The Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values
Blogs:
Climate Feedback (from Nature Climate Change)
New York Times Dot Earth Blog (Andrew Revkin)
Resources for kids:
US EPA Student’s Guide to Global Climate Change