8th Annual CFI Faculty Colloquium
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Global Climate Change |
Readings: Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast by David Archer and The Long Hot Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization by Brian Fagan
This faculty colloquium will be the initial event in the first Senior Capstone. The topic for the Capstone is Global Climate Change. This is a topic that embraces many urgent questions about our world--questions about religious conflict and violence, about the social foundations of political institutions, about the social impact of economic systems, about the interplay between nature and society. Thus, it is open to faculty in all academic divisions-Humanities, Arts and Letters, Sciences, and Social Sciences. We reserved 6 spaces for seminar professorsand the remaining spaces for other faculty members.
This event which will once again be held at the Galt House in Louisville. Please note that it will be in September instead of our usual January get-away.
David Archer, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast (Blackwell, 2006) ISBN: 1405140399 Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast is a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of global warming. Written in an accessible way, this important book examines the processes of climate change and climate stability, from the distant past to the distant future. Examining the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle, and what the future may hold for global climate, this text draws from a wide range of disciplines, and not only summarizes scientific evidence, but also economic and policy issues, related to global warming. A companion website provides access to interactive computer models of the physics and chemistry behind the global warming forecast, which can be used to support suggested student projects included at the end of each chapter. Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast provides an essential introduction to this vital issue for both students and general readers, with or without a science background.
Brian M. Fagan, The Long Hot Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (Perseus, 2005) ISBN: 0465022820 Humanity evolved in an Ice Age in which glaciers covered much of the world. But starting about 15,000 years ago, temperatures began to climb. Civilization and all of recorded history occurred in this warm period, the era known as the Holocene-the long summer of the human species. In The Long Summer, Brian Fagan brings us the first detailed record of climate change during these 15,000 years of warming, and shows how this climate change gave rise to civilization. A thousand-year chill led people in the Near East to take up the cultivation of plant foods; a catastrophic flood drove settlers to inhabit Europe; the drying of the Sahara forced its inhabitants to live along the banks of the Nile; and increased rainfall in East Africa provoked the bubonic plague. The Long Summer illuminates for the first time the centuries-long pattern of human adaptation to the demands and challenges of an ever-changing climate-challenges that are still with us today.
Both authors will be here for the symposium in November and these books will give us some real insight into the science of climate change and the effects of climate on culture/civilization.
Schedule of Events:
Friday, September 7
4:00 p.m. Arrive in Louisville and check into Galt House
4:30 p.m. Session 1 - What is the Capstone?
6:00 p.m. Dinner
7:30 p.m. Session 2 - What can we learn from Fagin?
9:00 p.m. Reception - Conservatory
Saturday, September 8
8:30 a.m. Breakfast
9:00 a.m. Session 3 - What can we learn from Archer?
10:30 a.m. Coffee Break
11:00 a.m. Session 4 - What is inconvenient about the truth? - Film: An
Inconvenient Truth
1:00 p.m. Lunch
2:00 p.m. Free time
7:00 p.m. Dinner in Rivue
Sunday, September 8
8:30 a.m. Breakfast
9:00 a.m. Session 5 - How true is the inconvenient truth? - Film: An
Inconvenient Truth or Convenient Fiction
10:30 Coffee Break
11:00 Session 6 - Concluding discussion
Colloquium Ends