Author Archives: Rickard

Hello World! We have created a short course evaluation covering the first sector of the course. You can find it at: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1536287/Sector-I-The-Science-of-Climate-Change. Looking forward to get your answers.

Best,

Rickard & Sanna

We've published the student leadership labs instructions under "Examination" in the menu above. During the semester, you will co-create two leadership labs:

The purpose of these sessions is for you to one, practice facilitation and leadership and two, to give you an opportunity to focus on a topic and activity of your choosing. Since we cannot cover everything and know that you all have ideas about what you think is important and worth discussing, we hope that this can be a space where you can explore something that we have not covered in our sessions, or that we have talked about but which you would like to explore more in-depth. As a guide, you should use the course goals which you can find in the syllabus, particularly the goals listed above.

Please read the full instructions! We have emailed you the groups for these labs, groups 1-3 are responsible for the first lab Wednesday 19/2. If you have questions you are welcome to ask us.

Best,

Rickard & Sanna

Analyze and interpret different theories of leadership, cooperation, organization and communication for a functioning climate change leadership

Hand in an individual reflection using the final course goal above as a framework. From a leadership perspective discuss the challenges that climate change science poses for sustainable development.

• Think about the different political goals, 350-450 ppm, Anderson: 1.5-2 degrees warming as “sustainable”?
• Think about Klein’s piece on what she argues “science tells us”

Please reference the literature on leadership from this sector to critically reflect upon what is needed for functioning climate change leadership.

• Hansen, for example, writes a lot about his thoughts of how his message has been received by “those in power”
• Think about what Parkin argues is needed for sustainability leadership (consider, for example, wicked problems, power relations, etc); how does this relate to climate change science?

You could also use the work you've done in groups as a point of discussion, how did you reason when you approached your particular actor?

Tuesday 4/2 we will have a seminar on uncertainty and skepticism in relation to climate science and the corresponding societal response. We suggest that you have a look on a recently published  journalistic piece from Mother Jones, entitled "Global-Warming Denial Hits a 6-Year High", which will give you some food for thought. I keep on recommending you to visit realclimate.org and will do so again as they also recently published a post about the role of scientists as advocates, which you can find here. There are a lot of relevant and interesting discussions going on in the comments to their posts.

In other news, we've had some questions about what you have to do if you can't attend some parts of the course. Workshops and student-led leadership labs are mandatory, and if you can't attend you will have to do a make-up task that corresponds to the content of the occasion you miss. We also have a 75 % mandatory attendance policy on the lectures and seminars (those that aren't student-led), which adds up to you needing to attend at least 24 out of 32 lectures/seminars. During May, we will have a couple of leadership lunches, these are chances for you to make up your attendance as we have not included them in the total count of 32 but will add to your own attendance (of course we would like to see as many of you at these discussions as possible anyhow). In May, you will also mainly work in groups with the final examination, which means it's up to each group to plan how to work with your climate change leadership cases.

The 75 % mandatory attendance is of course not just an exercise in counting how much of the course you can miss, it's about the importance of taking part in as much of,  from our side, and hopefully yours as well, the highly valued discussions about climate change leadership as possible.

Cheers,

R and S

Someone sitting in the back left a couple of leather gloves today, I'll bring them for class tomorrow.

Best,

Rickard

Well, those that we get from the lecturers. Veijo sent us his presentation for his lecture tomorrow, you can find it under "Literature>Lecture slides" in the menu above.

Best,
Rickard

Hi all, we've uploaded a preliminary schedule and the course information which you can find in the menus above. We would like you to read two short articles about climate change, politics and leadership for the course introduction. The first one is part of our course reader, published in 2012 Climate change going beyond dangerous – Brutal numbers and tenuous hope by Kevin Anderson, Professor of Energy and Climate Change and Director of the Tyndall Energy Programme in Manchester, UK. The second article is from the British political magazine Newstatesman, published in 2013, How science is telling us all to revolt Is our relentless quest for economic growth killing the planet? Climate scientists have seen the data – and they are coming to some incendiary conclusions, written by the author and journalist Naomi Klein. Both authors pose radical questions about our urgent needs and lacking efforts to tackle climate change and environmental degradation.

Looking forward to meet everybody in January.

Cheers,
Rickard and Sanna