We are a research team from Dickinson College consisting of 15 students and 2 professors.
We spent the past year in a course titled From Kyoto to Copenhagen, during which we attended the 15th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, interviewed parties to the conference, gave presentations to our community, blogged, wrote research papers, lectured at an international ethics conference,made posters, gave demonstrations, and learned a heck of a lot about climate change!
For the past year, this has been our blog. We’ve written in it from our first days of class last fall, through our whirlwind of a time at COP15, and for the next semester as we returned and hit the community with as much information as we could.
We hope this blog will continue to serve as an exciting educational asset, as a relic of this historic past year of climate change events and our thoughts on them.
I urge you especially to look at our reflections while at Copenhagen and our archive of video interview footage from COP15, which we are proud to offer as a unique educational experience unavailable anywhere else.
That class is over, though, and currently, I am writing one of two final posts. Yet as this blog closes, the movement does not.
Several of our team members have plans to attend (and I’m certain blog from) COP16, and I will link their blogs here as they become available.
And
Our professors will be bringing another class like ours to COP17 to continue what we’ve begun. It is my sincere hope that Dickinson College will continue to support these unique learning opportunities and that you’ll learn from them and pass them on to friends and family.
If there is only one thing I’ve learned from the past year (I swear I learned more than that), it is that education is the most important gift we can give.
We all know people that think climate change is a hoax or who maybe aren’t convinced it’s the single most important matter to our generation. These people simply haven’t had the opportunity to see what we have, and we urge you to share it with them.
Climate change is truly a global issue. A huge takeaway from Copenhagen for me was: policy is slow.
We cannot possibly wait for our governments to take care of everything for us. That climate change is a global issue and policy won’t be fast-moving enough to help in large part to mitigate its effects means that we need everyone’s help.
If there’s one thing I pledge for the future, and I hope you’ll join me in it, it’s that I won’t keep quiet in front of climate skeptics anymore.
I realize it’s difficult. It’s politically incorrect. But this is bigger than political correctness, and I bet you’ll make some new friends with this hefty dose of self-respect you have.
The bottom line is: climate change is bigger than you or me. Unfortunately no matter how much we recycle or eat locally, it won’t add up to much without others.
It’s an uphill battle, and the other team has some pretty cool weapons, but we hope the information contained within this blog will help you fight it, and I hope that very soon it will be linked to know blogs on COPs 16, 17, and beyond.
See you then.
