On Thursday, December 3, 2015 at 7:00pm, The Citizens Climate Lobby – Lancaster, and the Franklin and Marshall College Department of Earth & Environment hosted David Titley, Professor of Meteorology and Director of the Center for Weather and Climate Risk, Penn State University Rear – Admiral (retired), U.S Navy. He spoke to us about the correlation between Climate Change and National Security, with an emphasis on this being both a people issue and a polar bear issue.
Being a globalized society consisting of 8 billion people, we must be aware of our usage of energy, food and other very essential recourses. Titley explained why exactly we should care about climate change. Climate change matters for three simple reasons: It’s about people, it’s about water, and it’s about change. We as people must take initiative and educate ourselves; in order to come up with solutions. Secondly, water is the integrating principal to the entire issue. Lastly, if we can’t change as fast as our Earth is changing, we will run out of time to fix all the damage that’s been done.
Now you may ask, “Is Climate Change real?” Well, the evidence sure seems to prove so. Based on the number of natural disasters that have occurred since 1980- 2013, the air temperature that has been slowly getting warmer since 1884, and the way the ice caps in the north have been slowly disappearing since 2007, climate change is real. It’s not a silly question about believing in climate change, but a basic boring science issue that is proven in the data.
This then leads us to the way climate change will impact national security. This impact can be broken down into three, risk, which is probability x consequence, is accelerating quickly, climate change is a catalyst for conflict, and lastly, we have a failure of imagination when it comes to putting into perspective how bad this climate change may affect us. Since the Industrial Revolution our Earth has been changing, and now it’s only happening more and faster. With issues getting only worse, and policies not changing in order to better control to way we use our resources, issues like the ones happening in California will begin to occur everywhere. People will be devastated by droughts while sea levels rising will impact others. Ultimately driving us to conflict. These issues are not going away so we must get ready to change something about the way we’re treating the Earth.
Titley mentioned one way we can begin to resolve the issue is by moving the money. Instead of ignoring the issue, the government should make moves to further investigate ways we can use less energy and do less damage to the Earth. We must start changing our focus from war, and instead focus on our basic human existence on this Earth. He also introduced another way to start recolving the issues. In order to change the way we’re talking about climate change we can follow Titley’s L.L.M.A. method.
Learning – by simply doing some research we can learn about what exactly is happening to our Earth (visit http://whatweknow.aaas.org/get-the-facts/ or http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/events/a-discussion-on-climate-change-evidence-and-causes/ to learn more).
Local Action- thinking about the way you use energy, food water and other resources.
Monitor- being observant of the changes occurring on Earth and our individual impacts.
Advocacy- telling others about what you’re doing to stabilize the climate and create a non carbon future.
If we each are more aware of our impact on the Earth, and our roles in trying to improve it, we can move towards a cleaner, more stable Earth.