Come along to The Lighthouse bookshop (43-45 W Nicolson St, Edinburgh EH8 9DB)  at 7.30pm to watch the lecture by Prof Kevin Anderson and to discuss climate change…

 

Title of talk:

Climate Change and the Need to Change Behaviour in the West by Prof Kevin Anderson; Screening and Discussion

 

Bullet points of the evening:

• We are watching a lecture by Prof Kevin Anderson
• We will have a discussion on the points he raises in his talk
• We will be exploring what issues matter to people
• We will be exploring what differences people can make

 

A few paragraphs on the subject:

Climate change is about how the way that human beings collectively are impacting the ecology of the world, in particular via burning fossil fuels which produce carbon dioxide and practices that increase greenhouse gases that result in changes in temperature and weather patterns. Climate change is one of the most significant problems which the world faces yet because of its massive and diffuse nature approaches to dealing with it are caught in a miasma of differal and avoidance.
The recognition that cars and plane travel is fundamentally changing the weather and temperature, and in turn causing the melting of the polar ice caps to cause sea levels to rise is scant.  There is a cognitive dissonance about the lifestyle people feel they have a right to in the west and the acknowledgement that we are moving towards massive global upheaval because of consumer desires and convenience wants.  In many respects climate change isn’t about saving the planet but it is about us and our vulnerability to a level of climate disruption civilisation has never seen.
The massive industrialisation of beef and dairy herds has shaped behaviours such that meat and dairy seem to feature in nearly every single meal.  This production of so many head of cattle is resulting in the damaging of the environment through the sheer amount of methane which cows produce. Methane is between 28 and 34 times more potent than the equivalent amount of CO2 making the propensity to eat meat a significant contributor to climate change because of the production of greenhouse gases
Thinking about this in equitable terms is pivotal.  It will not be the rich who suffer first but the poorest.  Places like Bangladesh are most vulnerable and will be hit the hardest by sea level rises.  This in turn will reduce the amount of land on which people can live and farm causing the displacement of millions of people who will move into other countries for survival.
More extreme winters and summers are resulting and weather patterns become altered.  Understanding the impact of our multiple cheap flights to holiday on the continent means imagining what happens if the gulf stream changes then the temperature of Scotland will drop to the temperatures of Moscow in Russia.  Storms and winds become more eratic and many animal species will suffer along with plant species which are not adapted to the extremes.
The United Nations brought together the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to accumulate the science and research the problems we are collecitvely facing. What it requires is the collected awareness and behavioural change of human beings if we are to prevent impending tragedies and catastrophies from happening.
Prof Kevin Anderson is deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and does not mince his words when discussing the magnitude of the issues we face.  This talk he gives is a good and clear analysis of the flawed nature of how the climate change problem is being conceptualised and approached.  This event is about having a discussion on what people think about the issues and what might be done in response to the crisis.
We will be watching a presentation made by Kevin in Denmark which addresses the facts of climate change and prompts the rethinking of how climate change is collectively being approached.

 This is an information graphic created by Antti Lipponen visualizes more than 100 years of temperature change in 191 countries in just 35 seconds using NASA’s GISTEMP data.

 

Come along and join the discussion after the screening of Kevin Anderson’s presentation

 

For more information resources on this subject online you can visit:

Tyndall Institute for Climate Change: http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/
Watch Kevin Anderson on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kevin+anderson+climate+change+

 

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