A panel of five Oswego State professors from various departments discussed the effects of climate change April 24 as part of “Climate Change: A Wider Lens,” one of the events throughout Earth Week on campus.

The Campus Environment Advisory Council worked with the Sustainability Office to gather these professors to talk about how climate change is seen not only through a scientific lens but also through many aspects that contribute to society and the world. 

Moderated by creative writing and English professor Leigh Wilson, the panelists included global and international studies associate professor Lisa Glidden, meteorology assistant professor Michael Veres, political science assistant professor Allison Rank, philosophy assistant professor Mark Zelcer and economics professor Elizabeth Schmitt. 

Wilson began the discussion with an anecdote from her childhood.

She said she would join her grandmother in attending quilting bees with strong, stubborn and opinionated older women. Together, this community of women created beautiful quilts for charity. She tied this story in to the present need for the community to come together to come up with solutions for climate change. 

“This, right here, all of us, is our community doing what it’s supposed to be doing,” Wilson said. “That is connecting, sharing knowledge, adding up what we know and storing it up so we can act upon it and go out and pay it forward to the future.”

Glidden discussed how scientific literacy contributes to the issue of finding a good solution to climate change factors. She said, among her years instructing students, she noticed many of them have had grand ideas but did not think about the reality of achieving those goals. 

“On my optimistic side, I know we can reshape the world,” Glidden said. “In reality, we are all going to have to face these impacts.”

Glidden gave examples of how the world is already experiencing climate change, including cities in Florida preparing for an influx of people from the Caribbean and southern Florida seeking refuge because those areas will become so hot, they will be dangerously uninhabitable.

“Even places like [Oswego], where the price of houses is quite low and the price of land is quite low, will begin to feel the pressure because we have the fresh drinking water right here in our backyard,” Glidden said.

Veres led the audience through the physical scientific evidence of climate change through the average global temperatures. He said the last five years have experienced the highest temperatures since 1880. He also said the last time the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been this high was 3 million years ago.

“Over the last decade or two, warming has actually been about .2 degrees Celsius per decade,” Veres said. “That may not sound like much, but in the context of global warming, that’s pretty significant.”

Among the effects of climate change are the expansion of deserts and sudden floods due to changes in precipitation patterns. He said it will be possible to have both droughts and floods in one location. Other effects of global warming are an increase in sea levels, heat waves, depletion of coral and competition between natural and invasive species.

“The longer we wait, the more extreme changes that we’ll need to make,” Veres said. “The next decade itself is going to be very crucial.”

Rank talked about how political science plays as a factor in climate change. She used three concepts from her field: framing, the Overton window and standards for judicial action. Framing focuses on how an issue is constructed, including the language used and its image. She said using the term “global warming” and the image of the “starving polar bear on the melting ice caps” did not work in politics. Now, it is shifting to being linked to the aftermath of natural disasters. 

“The Overton window refers to the range of ideas that are considered reasonably up for political debate by political actors,” Rank said. 

She said politicians seeking office try to stay within that window and advocates try to push that window to make their ideas more standard. In regards to judicial action, Rank said there have been court cases questioning atmospheric trust litigation and why the government does not consider the atmosphere a public resource that needs to be protected. 

From a humanities take, Zelcer said the relationship between people from other professions and philosophers include an exchange of information and then creating further questions based on the data. 

“We have a whole lot of ways we can address the problem, but what we know is that each solution has a cost,” Zelcer said. “We’re going to have to confront a whole lot of philosophical issues.”

He also discussed risk assessment of the possible solutions to climate change and the questions of how to assess it. He said we do not know exactly what will happen or when because Earth is so complicated, so it is difficult to assess that risk. Another philosophical question he discussed was who exactly will be paying for or sacrificing to solve the problem of climate change. 

“The questions of global justice come to the front when we try to ask ourselves who should be sacrificing,” Zelcer said. “What should we be sacrificing? How much of it should we be sacrificing? How do we convince people that it’s worth sacrificing for other people?”

Schmitt discussed the difficulty of finding a good solution to climate change from an economics point of view. She said industrialization allowed for enormous benefits for society because it helped to increase the quality of life but at the cost of the environment. Schmitt explained how everything has a cost but not everyone bears it equally. She said humans often make bad decisions because they do not have to deal with the consequences right away.

“We don’t always make good choices when the consequences are far away,” Schmitt said. “As scientists make a very compelling and frightening case, the distance of the consequences from our decisions are causing the problem.”

Schmitt said there need to be incentives for people to actively work together to begin fixing the problem. A solution she discussed was the carbon tax to force people to pay for the cost they push onto others to bear. She said this would influence people to stop negative behavior toward the environment. She also proposed positive incentives such as solar panel rebates.

The panel discussion then moved into Q&A where community members asked them to further discuss their perspectives on climate change and the role humans play in it. The discussion was one of the various events on campus on the topic of the environment, climate change and sustainability to celebrate Earth Week, an extension of Earth Day, April 22.

Photo by Kassadee Paulo | The Oswegonian