Green Friday: Human Caused Climate Change

Human impacts on the climate go back to the beginnings of civilization and from the beginning, changing climate has driven human history. The Mediterranean is the best place to watch this happen and our story begins with the first myth that we have from mankind--Gilgamesh. From the beginnings of civilization, through the various societies of the classical Near East, careless agriculture and deforestation devastated Mediterranean forests and changed the climate irrevocably. The results were repeated wars, social collapse, and refugees, the same factors that remain driving forces in the Mediterranean today. The effects experts predict for our own future globally have already been felt with equal or even stronger impact locally for thousands of years. The motives, causes, and effects are the same; only the scale differs. Our purpose is to look for the "human" in human-caused climate change.

Speaker: Douglas Kenning (PhD, Edinburgh)