Researcher informs public of need to mitigate climate change

The man leaned forward, using words to express his point and hand gestures to communicate its gravity.

He is a researcher, passionate about his work and fervent because he has to be.

The future of the world depends on it.

Robert Davies is an associate professor at Utah State University and a storyteller. Last month as part of a speaking series on campus, he gave a pilot lecture on the dangers of climate change and its approaching tipping points.

According to Davies, the way humans live is unsustainable.

“This includes the way we eat,” Davies said. “The single largest factor is the way we produce and consume energy.”

With this pattern of production and consumption, he predicts catastrophic impacts could be seen in his students’ lifetimes.

“One can all but guarantee in the next three decades, either we transform these systems,” he said, “or nature will impose changes for us in the form of collapse.”

Davies said humans must take remedial actions even sooner to avoid crossing some irreversible thresholds which will trigger a downward spiral.

“We have something on the order of a decade to really get big progress in our response,” Davies said, “and if we don’t, it’s hard to picture recovery on any kind of human timescale; we’re talking millennia.”

Davies likened the dangers of passing these tipping points to the sinking of the Titanic.The ship could remain afloat if up to four of its compartments flooded but was doomed when its collision with the iceberg flooded five.

“From that point forward, essentially it was determined,” he said. “If we are essentially doing what we’re doing now 10 years from now, we will be flooding that fifth compartment, and there will be very little that we can do.”

USU meteorology Professor Lawrence Hipps used another analogy to illustrate the timeline on which change needs to occur.

The time to get a preventative vaccination is before symptoms appear. The time to prevent environmental problems due to climate change is before the occurrence of catastrophic events capable of the downfall of human civilization.

“Civilization is very finely tuned to the environment,” Davies said.

If mankind’s behavior doesn’t shift, some changes seen in the near future will impact whole countries, causing mass migration.

Hipps said such human movement will dwarf the number of current Syrian refugees.

“It will make them look like a couple of people,” he said.

Davies uses artistic methods to inform the public about climate change and uses audience feedback to make adjustments to his comprehensive, informational video.

“I understand that science lectures aren’t going to do it,” he said. “The way we connect to information is through our culture.”

He hopes the video presentation he’s developing will one day be shown to staff and students from all majors and disciplines throughout USU.