Students urged to fight climate change

The current crop of college students will have to help solve the problem of climate change, a panel of experts told freshmen at the University of Alabama at Birmingham on Monday.

The panel included Elizabeth Kolbert, author of "Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change," which UAB's class of 2012 was asked to read before arriving on campus. To prepare the students for small group discussions, Kolbert talked about the topic and then joined two other experts to discuss global warming.

"It's your generation that's going to feel the effects and it's your generation that will have the political pressure to do something," she said. "You can do something or not, but that choice is really up to you."

This the fourth year of UAB's discussion book program. Organizers say they chose Kolbert's book in part to give students a strong scientific understanding of the timely topic.

"This is a program that's not reflective of any political agenda but of an educational agenda," UAB President Carol Garrison said. "We hope the discussion book will help us all make informed decisions about this important issue."

The book, which began as a three-part series for The New Yorker magazine, consists of essays about "field trips" Kolbert took to look at the effects of climate change. She visited remote camps on the ice sheet in Greenland, the oft-flooded Netherlands and a village in Alaska threatened by the sea. And she examined how the production of greenhouse gases affects Earth's climate by trapping heat in the atmosphere.

"It seemed to me people really didn't appreciate the magnitude of the changes we are creating," Kolbert said Monday at the Alys Stephens Center for the Performing Arts.

Marilyn Kurata, UAB's director of core curriculum enhancement and one of the organizers of the discussion book program, said the book was selected in part because its subject matter would challenge students' assumptions and spark discussion.

Each year, a committee narrows a list of books nominated by the community to three, and Garrison makes the final selection, Kurata said. Previous books were "`The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" by Anne Fadiman, "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini and "All Over but the Shoutin'" by Rick Bragg.

"One of the things we want to do is get the conversation going, and if we pick a book that isn't going to elicit a response, it's not going to get their interest," Kurata said.

The panel discussion among Kolbert; Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economics professor from Yale University who specializes in the environment; and Henry Pollack, professor of geology at the University of Michigan, sparked a few cheers and jeers from the roughly 800 students in the audience.

For example, Mendelsohn drew cheers when he said that humans would adapt to whatever challenges global warming would present, whether it was building walls around coastal cities to keep the ocean out or farmers planting new crops in a hotter climate.

"If you fail to recognize that there will be some adaptation, you will totally overblow the magnitude of the damages," he said.

But Pollack said the effects are already visible, from thinning ice at the poles to increased evaporation on the Great Lakes that has left freighters stranded in shallow water.

Call to action:

Kolbert argued that unless something is done soon, the problem will become more difficult as developing nations such as India and China build more power plants. And she asked the students if they were prepared to help.

"Are you taking account of the millions and billions of people who will live on this planet in future generations?" she asked. "Are you really looking at their benefit, or our benefit for the next couple of decades?"