Author Archives: Rickard

Please fill in the course evaluation as it is an important way to improve the course!

Sector II - Mindsets and Justice (if you didn't do it earlier this semester)

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1564778/Section-II-Mindsets-and-Justice

Sector III-V - The rest of the course

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1671917/Sector-II-V-CCL-2015

As announced, today's leadership lunch will be from 13:15-14:00. 14:15-16:00 will we take part in a living leadership workshop with Anthony McCann in Norrlandssalarna, Geocentrum. Read more about Anthony and the workshop here: http://www.csduppsala.uu.se/2014/may-5-living-leadership-workshop-with-anthony-mccann/

What does it mean to write about climate change? Special issue of Diacritics on writing and thinking on climate change from the perspective of literary criticism.

We might go to an extreme and suggest that whether or not we explicitly take up climate change in our writing (critical, creative, institutional-bureaucratic, or otherwise), climate change takes us up. Writing in the time of climate change—even critical writing engaged with texts from before the widespread extraction of fossil fuels—is necessarily untimely, out of joint with familiar modes of thinking and being, no matter how heterogeneous these may be. As universal subjects under the globalized umbrella of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, we have come to the threshold of a radical geo-epistemological break, but one that we may have to suppress in order to go on writing. As Ian Baucom has written in an essay as subtle as it is devastating, we are forced to search for a new method that might—remotely—respect the chaotic multidimensionality of being-as-geology, of a radically changed earth. Pinkus, Karen, 2013, Diacritics, Volume 41, Number 3, 2013. p.3-4.

Accessible from within the University network, highly recommended! You can find it here: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/toc/dia.41.3.html

RealClimate.org has got a nice write-up on the recently published report from IPCC on the mitigation of climate change. There are some interesting numbers and projections to have a look at:

For the first time, a detailed analysis was performed of how the 2-degree limit can be kept, based on over 1200 future projections (scenarios) by a variety of different energy-economy computer models. The analysis is not just about the 2-degree guardrail in the strict sense but evaluates the entire space between 1.5 degrees Celsius, a limit demanded by small island states, and a 4-degree world. The scenarios show a variety of pathways, characterized by different costs, risks and co-benefits. The result is a table with about 60 entries that translates the requirements for limiting global warming to below 2-degrees into concrete numbers for cumulative emissions and emission reductions required by 2050 and 2100. This is accompanied by a detailed table showing the costs for these future pathways.

You can find the article at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/04/mitigation-of-climate-change-part-3-of-the-new-ipcc-report/

A couple of hours ago, the Guardian published an article by Naomi Klein on our climate predicament. The article is definitely worth reading, discussing climate change in relation to the current political-economy.

So much of our economy relies on the assumption that there is always an "away" into which we can throw our waste. There's the away where our garbage goes when it is taken from the curb, and the away where our waste goes when it is flushed down the drain. There's the away where the minerals and metals that make up our goods are extracted, and the away where those raw materials are turned into finished products. But the lesson of the BP spill, in the words of ecological theorist Timothy Morton, is that ours is "a world in which there is no 'away.'"

You can find it at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/23/climate-change-fight-of-our-lives-naomi-klein

These are the cases suggested last Wednesday. Cases with 5 under them are full. If you haven't decided on which group/topic you want to work with, please give it a thought for tomorrow.

Hi! Unfortunately we will not be discussing collaborative consumption today. We will instead continue our re-imagination of climate change by asking the question of how climate change is represented in arts and popular culture by looking on a couple of examples from recent years.

A short summary of happenings the following weeks:

Thursday, April 24th at 17.15-20.30, we are happy to welcome Polly Higgins for an open lecture on Ecocide. The lecture will be held in Ihresalen Engelska Parken, Thunbergsvägen 3 Uppsala.

Folks kitchen Uppsala will have an event April, 27, see the Facebook page for more information.

Saturday, May, 3rd, the cows will be let out on pasture on Sju gårdar, you can find additional information at: http://www.sjugardar.se/koslapp2014

Oh, and don't forget to celebrate Valborg!

Best,
S and R

Question in the title, answer at: https://what-if.xkcd.com/88

Cheers! 😀

Hi all! It would be great if you could fill in the course evaluation of section II, Mindsets and Justice. You can find it at http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1564778/Section-II-Mindsets-and-Justice.

Have a nice weekend!

Best,
Sanna and Rickard

Hi ya'all!

So we've got a bunch of links to content that has been discussed or referred to during our last couple of meetings. First off, a new Norwegian hosted portal on societal transformation in relation to climate change with a lot of useful content to check out, C-Change. Second off, Kevin Andersons webpage can be found at Kevinanderson.info. Third off, SEI got an equity calculator up and running, where you play around with different pathways on carbon emissions from an equity perspective at gdrights.org/calculator/. And finally some guidance on how to approach the written assignment on "Why we disagree about climate change".

Hulme writes about the plurality of climate change, the different meanings that are put into the concept of climate change. In one setting climate change is “the greatest market failure the world has seen” in another it is first and foremost an issue of grave injustice, of colonialism. These different meanings and interpretations leads to a range of equally different solutions to the problem. How do we proceed in a setting where we both acknowledge these differences in definitions and discourses but try to find common ground? Again, what kind of leadership is to be used on such a diffuse and “wicked” problem such as climate change? What are the pre-requisites of governance on global level if we acknowledge that the “we” that are supposed to do something about come from radically different cultural contexts? Is it even possible?
One important thing to remember is that this question does not have one right answer, different paths forward can be discussed and you don’t have to agree with Hulme!