Before setting foot on the Emens Auditorium, John R. stage Tuesday night, Elizabeth Kolbert picked up a copy of The Star Press and saw some unsettling news. Kolbert read an article that said out of 23 Ball State University students in a discussion group about her book, four students were concerned about climate change. Two didn't express any opinion and the 19 others were not concerned at all.
"I found those statistics quite startling," Kolbert said. "As of yet, the response by our society has not been commensurate to the scale of the [global warming] problem."
Will we respond? Kolbert asks. She said that was the question of our time.
"Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change" is Kolbert's latest book and was selected this year to be the required summer reading for Ball State freshmen as a part of the Freshman Connections program.
Associate professor of sociology Melinda J. Messineo is in charge of the operation. She said she felt this year's book selection was befitting with the environmental ambitions of the university in years past and in the present.
"Ball State has had a long history of being environmentally conscious," Messineo said. "Kolbert's book reaffirms our stance on the issue of global warming."
In addition to citing President Jo Ann Gora signing an agreement last year to cap Ball State's carbon emissions, she also said Ball State had hosted the Greening the Campus convention roughly every two years since 1996. The convention brings together professors from all across the country to discuss how to make U.S. colleges more accommodating to the global warming issue.
When Kolbert finally took the stage, she showed a slide show from the trip she took to research for the book. She traveled all across the Arctic to Iceland, Greenland, Dead Horse, Shishmaref and many other destinations along the northern hemisphere. The Arctic, she said, is the greatest gauge for tracking the severity of global warming.
"In places like Alaska you have permafrost, which is essentially frozen dirt," Kolbert said in her speech. "Permafrost has been frozen for thousands of years and as it thaws we can see a drastic physical change in the landscape of the area."
She showed a picture of massive trees that had fallen and homes that had collapsed as a result of the thawing. She also cited the sheet ice in Greenland as a consummate frame of reference fwor the drastic implications of global warming.
"The ice sheet on Greenland, if melted, could cover much of the northern hemisphere with water," Kolbert said. "Coastal cities like New York would just simply disappear."
As she ran through the various proofs for global warming and how human carbon emissions have a major impact on the equilibrium of the Earth's energy, Kolbert pointed out that by the time global warming would take its full effect it would be too late to try and mend the situation. She also said that effects of global warming we are experiencing now were from past carbon emissions, and the effects of our present emissions would take a few decades to appear.
"Global warming is like a bomb that you know is about to go off, but are uncertain as to when it will implode," she said. "As a society we must be fastidious in our response to this impending disaster."
As for the lack of social response to the issue, Kolbert said obstructionist politicians and the lack of enthusiasm and knowledge on the part of youth voters as essential causes for the slight absence of responsiveness. Although she sees an increase in awareness on the issue, she said as a society we needed to take the reality of global warming more seriously.
"I don't think that just buying stickers and T-shirts at the concert of an environmentally driven band will solve the problem," Kolbert said. "We need people out to vote into office legislators and government officials who take global warming seriously."
She also said to begin reducing our impact on the ozone, citizens needed to be making little personal sacrifices when it came to their consumption of energy.
Despite the fatalistic implications and future uncertainty, Kolbert and others agree there are many things people can do and are beginning to help. Recently, all of the industrialized nations (with the exception of the United States) have signed the Kyoto Protocol, which requires the nations involved to commit to reducing their country's carbon emissions. In addition to many national efforts to combat global warming, a myriad of small grass roots and college campus clubs and committees have arisen in response to the issue.
Carissa Buchholz, a natural resources and environmental management major, is the president of Ball State's Students for a Sustainable Campus. She said she felt Kolbert's speech was extremely important. She agrees with Kolbert's emphasis on responding to global warming, she said.
"This issue is something that is pivotal to our generation and a proper response to the issue is dire," Buchholz said. "I feel optimistic though. There has been a increase in SSC memberships and it seems that there is beginning to be a consensus among world leaders that this situation must be attended to immediately."
She said the SSC and other organizations like it provide many ways to mitigate global warming and spread the message.