Natures Past: Exhibit & Lecture Series
Beginning on Wednesday October 13, 2010 from 7-9pm, NiCHE is sponsoring a lecture series on environmental history in western Canada that will be held at the Provincial Archives of Alberta in Edmonton. Running in conjunction with the exhibit Natures Past: Archival Evidence of Environmental and Climate Change four speakers, including scientists and historians, will present a public lecture each Wednesday evening from Oct. 13th to Nov. 3rd. For more information please see the exhibit and lecture series page. Lectures are free, but please RSVP to paaevents@gov.ab.ca or 780-427-1750 if you wish to attend.
Call for Contributions - Regional Climate Bibliographies
We've been putting together bibliographies of secondary materials dealing with the climate history of Canada as part of ECED. These bibliographies are organized principally by region, as this is the most important scale of analysis for climate issues in Canada. The bibliographies need contributions from regional experts. Please feel free to post sources of interest in the comments attached to this post. Alternatively, you can email them to me (epiper@ualberta.ca) as single references or files. To see what we have so far, go to our Bibliographies page.
Climate History in the News
NY Times story about Thoreau, Walden, & climate research:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/science/earth/28wald.html?pagewanted=1...
A climate history conference in Maine, in April 2009:
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=163450
Public Deliberation on Climate Change
On the weekend of September 26-28, 2008 a Collaborative Workshop on Deliberative Democracy and Climate Change was held in Edmonton at the University of Alberta. This event looked at ways to mobilize citizens around the issue of climate change and its future impacts. If you are interested in climate change or citizen engagement as current issues, I would encourage you to visit the Public deliberation on climate change website, and even to think about joining in the conversation there.
I authored a briefing document on climate change for the workshop. It gives an overview of climate change science, focuses in specifically on likely impacts in Alberta, and also situates Alberta's contribution to the problem within a Canadian and global context. The final two pages of the document list a variety of sources for further reading. You can download the document here, or over at the workshop website.
I found this an interesting opportunity to contribute, as a historian, to a current debate. Authoring the briefing document gave me the opportunity to inject some historical perspective into a debate which like so many these days is historically shallow.
I think that as historians we need to draw attention to the fact that communities and societies have faced ecological crises in the past. Acknowledging this history offers optimism, after all, although the Norse in Greenland didn't survive their climate crisis, the Thule in Greenland did. It's not the climate itself, but social resilience and adaptability that is key.
Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions
You are invited to attend the following session at "Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions" (10-12 March 2009, Copenhagen, Denmark): Informing the Future by Understanding the Past. Session convenors: Bette Otto-Bliesner and Chris Turney.
Please be aware, the abstract deadline is Monday 1 September 2008
(www.climatecongress.ku.dk).
Session summary: The past can play a tremendously important role in helping us understand future climate change. This session will invite reports on the latest reconstructions, from data and from modeling, of periods of past climate change that can provide important lessons about the nature, links and causes of climate change at the continental and global scales (e.g. Eemian, Holocene Climatic Optimum) and/or human responses to variability (past civilizations or cultures). Contributions are invited from any part of the globe and dealing with any aspect of climate change and/or archaeological response.
Congress Purpose: The Danish Government as host of the UN Conference on Climate Change (COP15) to be held in Copenhagen at the end of 2009 has asked International Alliance of Research Universities to organise this conference as part of the run-up to the COP 15. All findings will be compiled in a book on climate change, and an executive summary with the main findings from the congress will, after agreement with the Danish Government, be handed over to policy makers at the COP15 in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.