V + A Teach In
12 October 2009
I attended the Teach-In at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was a series of lectures and talks based on environmental issues, sustainability, global warming and climate change. The first lecture was from Richard Hawkins, on Climate Safety, which was really interseting, informative and terrifying- Predictions that by 2040 all ice will have melted and predictions that when the permafrost melts the amount of Co2 and Methane released will be higher than all emissions now. The second lecture was on Ecological Literacy by Jody Boehnert, she introduced to us the six degrees of climate change, a future scenario featured in Ecomag No. 1 (June 2009). Which were a series of beautiful illustrations and artistic interpretations by six different artists responding to the book 'Six degrees' by Mark Lynas,
which was compiled from hundreds of scientific papers describing the projected changes with each degree of climate warming. (see below)
Artwork: Kate Evans. 1 Degree: "Consider the thought that living species, which have evolved on this planet over millions of years, could be destroyed for ever in the space of one human generation."
Artwork: Airside. 2 Degrees: "A three degree rise in global temperature - something that could happen as early as 2050 - effectively reverses the carbon cycle. Instead of absorbing Co2 vegetation and soil starts releasing it in massive quantities, as soil bacteria work faster to break down organic matter in a hotter environment, and plant growth goes into reverse. ... in other words the Hadley centre's team had discovered that carbon cycle possible feedbacks could tip the planet into a runaway global warming spiral by the middle of this century ..."
Artwork: Rob Hunt. 3 Degrees: " For an anologue of the three degree world we have to go back ... before the earth its regular cycle of ice ages and interglacial. We have to go back a full 3 million years, to a period of time called the Pliocene. Continentals glaciers were almost entirely absent - contributing to a sea level 25 metres higher than todays. ... if emissions go on rising as they are , global temperatures could shoot past 3 degrees as early as 2050."
Artwork: Jamie Slimmon. 4 Degrees: "Poplulation will be flocking north, to overcrowded refuges in the Baltic, Scandinavia and the British Isles... but with habitable areas becoming more and more crowded, conflict may come sooner rather than later even in temperate civilised Europe."
Artwork: Jody Barton. 5 Degrees: "With five degrees of global warming, an entirely new planet is coming into being - one largely unrecognisable from the Earth we know today... Humans are herded into shrinking zones of habitability by the twin crises of drought and flood."
Artwork:Leona Clarke. 6 Degrees: "Hotter oceans bring hurricanes, far outdoing anything we see today. these superhurricanes (Hypercanes) wil have enough energy to the North pole and back, perhaps even allowing them to repeatedly circumnavigate the globe."There were then lectures from Andrew Simms, Emma Dewbury and Ben Gill on Ecological Debt, Nurturing ecological habits of mind in Design and One planet living respectively. Also speaking were Jonathon Crinion, Creativity: A Social Ecological Approach, Stephanie Hankey, Design Activism and John Thackara, Three Step plan for Universities. All lectures were interseting, but some more than others, I didn't last til the end of the day; i found it an awful lot of information to take in at one time.
