Hi,
Thanks for a nice day at the field trip, I hope it was fruitful for all of you.
As you know, we are not meeting at the class 25th of September (this tuesday). Instead you are assigned to watch a TED Talk and a documentary. You can choose when and where. You are expected to watch it together with your project group.
TASK (due 27th September Thursday 23.59)
1. Watch the TED Talk with your project group.
2. Watch the documentary with your project group.
3. Answer the following questions in the form at the end of this post.
a. What traces of the report "Planetary Boundaries" can you see in Johan Rockström's TED Talk?
b. Pick up at least two claims/ideas/statements from the documentary to bring as questions to Kjell Aleklett the 7th of October. (Read more about him below.)
FURTHER INFO ------
So far in the course you have had lectures and activities of people from one wing of thoughts, when it comes to the sustainability. You have gotten a picture of what is happening to the world, what changes we are facing and why they are happening. But there are of course people that think the other way, that most of the claims about the climate change is not true.
The TED Talk you are going to watch is by Johan Rockström, one of the scientists that introduced the "Planetary Boundaries" concept to the world. (You can find a copy of this report in your course reader.) This is a continuation and deepening of the problems we are dealing with during the course, but still from the same wing: assuming that we are facing big challenges and the human population needs to do big changes in its ways.
The documentary, on the other hand, is focusing on climate change being a "hoax" and is trying to build an argumentation around that.
What you are supposed to do is prepare a challenge for Kjell Aleklett. Aleklett is a professor in Energy Systems and he will be visiting our course the 9th of November to give a lecture on "Peak-Oil and Post-Oil Scenarios". He has been in many CEMUS lectures over the years and has given his researcher team's view on how the global oil reserves are diminishing and what we are about to face as the global society. Read this extract from an interview he has given to Uppsala University's newspaper "Universen", in the latest issue from September 2012. (Roughly translated from Swedish to English)
Reporter: The subject [about peak-oil] is controversial, because not everyone agrees on how long the world's oil reserves will last. How has it been to be challenged/questioned?
Kjell Aleklett: The last chapter [in my new book] is called "the inconvenient Swede". I do not mind people call me that. Swedish people are usually supposed to be diplomatic but it does not apply to me.
If something is totally new and doesn't get hard critics it doesn't generate results to come by. Therefore, it has been inspiring with all the critics. Now it seems as if many people realize the seriousness of the issue [of Peak-oil] and now it will go faster for ideas to spread.