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Module 2 Learning Activity

Let's do a quick recap of this module. The module's been a bit longer than other modules because I wanted to give you more of a foundation in why we should be concerned about climate breakdown and give you more understanding of what's going on and what's coming.

We talked about the fact that we really do understand the atmosphere and we understand climate change historically very well. It is a bit hard to know how things will happen in the future because we're changing the atmosphere at such a different rate. However, it should be very concerning that there are so many uncertainties and so many things we don't know for sure. You can dig deeper into these topics and take a look at the different slides if you didn't see them already in the PDF for this module. You can do the same in the eBook and probably access some additional information that I might not have covered in the [00:01:00] lectures for this module.

I don't know how many of you have seen the 1983 movie “War Games” with Matthew Broderick. If you haven't, I encourage you to track it down. It's a fun movie. What's going on in the movie is that you have a super computer called the WOPR (War Operation Planned Response). The slide shows a picture of WOPR simulating nuclear exchanges and all sorts of nuclear war games with Russia -- testing out hundreds of scenarios for having a nuclear war with Russia.

What happens is that the computer actually has control over the launch codes. The humans are freaked out that it's going to actually launch weapons. But WOPR doesn't launch weapons. It stops and says to its programmer:

“What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

That is very much the situation with climate change. Based on what we've talked about in this module it should be clear that the only [00:02:00] winning move when it comes to climate is not to have played the game at all. Unfortunately, we didn't do that. We are playing the game and we're headed full speed ahead into climate change.

In the next module, we'll take a look at what can we do at this point? Can we stop it? Can we slow it? What are we trying to accomplish here? We'll follow that up with a discussion of if we can do something about climate change, why aren't we doing something about climate change? Both very interesting questions.

So come back for the next module.

Additional Materials

To get a good overview of the topic of climate risk, we’d recommend (the first two for the second time) these two somewhat dated but still very relevant reports. If you click through to them you’ll also see that we’ve extracted ideas and graphics you can take a look at.

Note that when you access these reports you can jump to their “parent thought” which is likely to be a much larger collection of potentially relevant materials.

You can dig much deeper into the Fingerprint of Climate Change both in the more simply structured Open Access Climate Web, and in the Premium Access Climate Web.

When it comes to the question of “What’s Coming?” you can explore a lot of content even in the Open Access Climate Web:

Although the topic of “how bad can it get?” is quite hard to pin down, a few very relevant sources to help you easily dig a bit deeper are:

Other links we thought might be of particular interest: