Guest Speak Bernie Evans

This week yet another truly interesting and inspiring week. This week we had the privilege of having a guest speaker in Bernie Evans with us to discuss the Encyclical that has been written by Pope Francis. Bernie Evans thought us a wide background of information about Pope Francis, the Catholic Church and it's viewpoints on several moral and ethical views, as well as helped to break down and ensure that we all understood the Encyclical and what was meant by several other big points found within the Encyclical. I personally found it very interesting to hear about these issues presented in the Encyclical written by Pope Francis from the perspective of a person such as Bernie Evans who has spent the majority of his life studying the church and topics such as personal viewpoints of the church and the Catholic religion overall. I am a Catholic myself so I found these two days of class especially rewarding because I learned as well as was refreshed on several of the Catholic church's teachings and viewpoints. Bernie Evans inspired me to continue to live my life in accordance with the Catholic church and in the views of Pope Francis, and God overall. I also found this week interesting because this week was a sort of "alternate" perspective to look at the ideas and concepts of climate change. It was a unique perspective to look at the concepts of climate change through the catholic church's eyes and viewpoints and learn about what should be done on many of these moral issues in accordance to the catholic church and viewpoints to be in accordance with God. I have been truly enjoying having the opportunity to hear from these guest speakers and their knowledgeable positions in relation to climate change and I look forward to hearing from Jean as well.

Troy Knight Speaker Blog Post

This was a special week of class because we had the privilege of Troy Knight coming into class and speaking on the topic and facts of climate change. It was truly interesting to listen to someone speak who was clearly as knowledgeable on these important climate change issues as Troy is. I enjoyed when we went through the long history of Earth's timeline as I feel like that was valuable information to know and understand because it really gives you an idea of how truly short humans have been on this earth in perspective of the overall picture of Earth's timeline. We also discussed several of the basic ingredients for climate on Earth including Earth temp, sun, and atmosphere. We then discussed the most recent climate change and warming causes that Troy described to us as: sun, greenhouse effect, orbit, albedo, and global circulation. This was something that I enjoyed learning about because we as a society and a world need to take a deep look at what these causes are and do whatever we can to address this problem so that we can limit the effects of climate change that we as humans are causing. We also talked about these warming causes more specifically by breaking them down into each category. The first was sun: long term trend. Orbit: last 6000 years, 1 degree Celsius cooling in the last 6000 years. Albedo: volcanism. Global Circulation: El Nino. Greenhouse Effect: 33 degree Celsius warming of earth, critical to survival. Changes in Greenhouse Effect: Natural abundance of  greenhouse gases. This is all great information to know because in order for us to begin to try to combat climate change, we must first fully understand the great and growing problem that is at hand.

This weeks readings were rather thought provoking. They really got to the idea of "if we don't change our ways now, serious consequences will be the results." The "Collapse of Western Civilization" especially got at the point of what will be to come if we don't change our harmful and consumptive habits and lifestyles that we are currently living. It takes an interesting perspective of being in the future tense and talking as though not enough was done to combat climate change and the world is currently suffering the consequences. It talks about a variety of issues including: the amount of that takes place in regards to climate change in the fact that because it inconveniences people and climate change is not something that the people want to here about and think about, they write it off and deny that anything will happen to the world as predicted, which is not the case. Also it discusses how global climate change will affect the world economy and markets, local populations in terms of population size and animals that can survive in an area etc. It raises many good points about what to come if we as a world to change our harmful consumptive habits.

The Climate Cultures readings for this week take a more "scientific" approach while looking in depth at climate change itself. It talks about a wide variety of things involving climate change such as varying climates throughout the world and the climate change noted by different people across the world in different climates. It also takes a rather in depth look at the different attempts that have been legally made in order to limit these negative climate change occurrences such as the Stockholm and Rio Summits and so on.

Both readings were very informative and valuable reads that touched on a very wide variety of climate change issues.

Work Cited:
Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Barnes, Jessica, and Michael Dove. Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change. New Haven: Yale UP, 2015. Print.

This first weeks readings were very interesting and at the same time alarming. They made me realize that we as a society need to wake up. A big thing that I took away from this weeks reading was the terrible mindset of "I can't make a difference". Yes if a person was to only change their own personal habits, the overall change in the global climate problems regarding climate change seen would be extremely minimal. But I believe that we each must be held accountable for our own personal actions and should take pride in ourselves to do all that we can do to limit our own personal emissions and overall wastes that we continually all release into our environment on a daily basis. If the mindset of everyone goes from having the mindset that they cannot make a change, to if I do my part, and I trust that other people will do their part to limit their own personal emissions; then a change may be seen. I do however realize that this is unlikely to happen. Because of this I believe that there should be more strict regulations put into place that holds individuals accountable their own emissions. I believe that with strict regulations regarding emissions would eliminate the mindset of " why should I reduce my emissions if I get to see my friends continue their own more wasteful lifestyles that are more convenient while I am continually inconvenienced". I believe that we as a society need to realize that our harmful and wasteful lifestyles have gone on long enough and we need to make great changes before it is too late. This has been said time and time again yet we continually only say "we need to make changes" yet this thoughts and plan are never put into action in reality. It sounds good and looks good on paper but we need to take these great of ideas of change that we have been talking about and put them into action in order to essentially save the world as we know it that we live in.