Climate Issues

- - Dec 10, 2019 Global Study Series, Part 2: Climate Makes and Breaks Civilizations: Lessons Learned on the Nile
    XMNR faculty Dr. Bruce Hull reflects on the civilization-defining impacts of climate change, as he travels through Egypt on a Global Study trip with a group of Virginia Tech’s graduate students.
- - Dec 10, 2019 Global Study Series, Part 1: Egyptian Environmental Security: Old Wine in a New Bottle
    CLiGS faculty Bruce Hull and Michael Mortimer have recently spent three weeks in Egypt exploring Cairo and traveling upstream along the Nile River to the Aswan High Dam. Sharing experiences and reflections on the past and future of a country astride some of the most pressing environmental challenges of the 21st Century. This series of posts distills some of their thoughts on those challenges.
- - Dec 06, 2019 Know Your Climate Bias
    Regardless of what you think about climate change, you can’t deny that the topic is of growing importance in local, national, and international discussions. In this post, Dr. Bruce Hull describes six climate biases, illustrates policies, assumptions, and examples of each, and offers practical strategies for how to recognize and address common climate biases in yourself and others.
- - Nov 11, 2019 Sustainable Cities Series, Omaha, Nebraska, Part 2: Climate Change
    Cities take up less than three percent of land surface, but they are responsible for producing between sixty to eighty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Online MNR student Ned Bagniewski examines the effects of climate change on the city of Omaha, Nebraska.
- - Oct 23, 2019 ‘Cause I’m Leavin’ on a Jet Plane: Offsetting the Environmental Cost of Air Travel
    Fall semester 2019, the Virginia Tech Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability (CLiGS) will begin mitigating the carbon emissions from the air travel of both its students and faculty. Working with the company Terrapass, CLiGS will contribute to a portfolio that invests in renewable energy and methane recapture. CLiGS is the first group within Virginia Tech to launch this kind of climate action initiative.
- - Aug 09, 2019 Climate change: a new twist on a very old story
    More than 80 percent of adults in the United States now believe that climate change (i.e, global warming) is happening. However, only slightly more than 50 percent believe that humans are responsible (Pew 2018). Despite the established scientific consensus that our current climate crisis is the result of human activity, nearly half of the adult U.S. population still don’t believe it! And yet, there is more to this story; much more. I suspect that only a very small percentage of people know that humans have been contributing to climate change in significant (and positive) ways for thousands of years.