Hi Charlotte and Lubomir,
Good discussion starting here!
I want to challenge some of the things that Lubomir says, however.
Global warming: Lubomir says "we are not sure yet". But what is it that we are not sure of? "We" -- if we mean the global scientific community studying climatology, (and not "we- the general public") have quite a lot of certainty that humans are influencing climate beyond anything that can be explained by Milankovitch cycles (earth's tilt, etc.). We (the former) know with quite a lot of certainty that the temperature now is warmer than anything that society as we know it has experienced.
Re: meteorology being the west's foundations for predictions... well, not really in the climate models that are widely used. Meteorology - primarily related to weather processes forecasting - is about short-term (weather) and is quite a lot different than long-term (climate).
Ice melt... is changing in very significant ways -- it's too simple to say that it's simply melting & regenerating. Glacial ice is not re-forming anywhere near the rate at which it's melting. This leads to huge problems for water supplies, especially in some of the areas of the world with the highest populations (e.g. India, Bangladesh, some areas in China and South America). Arctic ice is thinning: so that now ice melts more completely in the summer months than in anytime since human society as we know it has developed. So while the ice does re-form in the winter, it is not as thick, and there is not "old ice" that has been around for centuries. Summer ice melt leads to major concerns of reduced albedo, leading to reinforcing cycles of increased energy absorption.
Deforestation... is a huge concern within discussion of the global carbon cycle, and solutions to global warming can not be discussed without discussing the role of forests. Not sure why you would say that westerners don't care about it... any more / less than westerners care about other things. I mean that those who understand some of the complexities certainly DO understand the importance of forests, while those who sit back and question whether or not humans are influencing climate may not.
My point: there is quite a lot of certainty around the idea that humans are impacting the climate. There is MUCH LESS certainty about what the effects of what we are doing will be... increased temperatures / precipitation here, decreased temps / precip there. I think it's important that we -- as scientists -- be accurate on these points.
With regard to energy transitions... the challenge now is that there is now energy source that provides energy density. In previous energy transitions, society has been able to move to a more energy dense energy source... coal had more energy per unit than wood, and oil had more energy per unit than oil. As we face the end of oil... we do not have an energy source to move to that is more dense than what we are using now. The sun provides 10,000x the amount of energy that human society uses... but we do not have a good way to capture it, let alone transport it after we capture it.
This is what the "sustainability" movement is doing: bringing together all of these separate issues (global warming, deforestation, ocean acidification, freshwater access, energy, pollution, etc. etc. et.c) to say that we (global society) has lots of problems that affect different people in different ways. Some of those sustainability people are able to portray this as an ocean full of opportunities... rather than a lot of reasons to be depressed!
I agree very much with Charlotte's point that media reporting greatly influences society's perception of environmental (and social) problems. The challenge in the west is the increasing rate of ownership of media by big / private industry... which often has a motive to increase profits n the way of the status quo... which is often destructive of the global system.
Our role... as researchers working with product/service design... can/should be to finds way for businesses to do what they need to do (be profitable) in ways that do not destroy ecological and social systems. To do this, we need both radically new approaches to meeting human needs... while also meeting people who are doing design / product development work on a day-to-day basis to provide the incremental innovations that bring them along. I'd like to open up a discussion about how we can support that to happen...
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