Speaker: Paul Edwards
Abstract
Since the industrial revolution in the 1800s, infrastructural path dependence has locked modern societies into unsustainable energy systems based on fossil fuels. We now annually release billions of tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, irrevocably altering Earth's climate. This talk explores how we know what we know about climate change, some of its likely effects, and what we can do about it. Climate change knowledge is based on numerous independent lines of evidence, from instrument data to ice cores to mathematical models run on supercomputers. The enormous complexity of Earth's climate system, with its many positive and negative feedbacks, makes precise prediction impossible. Yet the broad outlines of climate change impacts have been known for more than 40 years. Climate change requires concerted action at every level: individual, social, political, and international. Scientists and engineers can help identify the most effective levers for minimizing global warming and adapting to its now-unavoidable impacts.
About the Speaker...
Paul N. Edwards is Director of the Program on Science, Technology & Society at Stanford University and Professor of Information and History (Emeritus) at the University of Michigan. He writes and teaches about the history, politics, and culture of information infrastructures. Edwards is the author of A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010) and The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996), and co-editor of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001), as well as numerous articles. With Geof Bowker, he co-edits a book series, Infrastructures, for MIT Press. Edwards is currently serving as one of over 900 lead authors for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to be released in 2021.