Read the IPCC climate change report with us!

Yesterday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a major set of reports about the climate crisis. These are very important documents for the topic, and so I’d like to host an online reading and discussion of them with a focus on what this means for higher education.

To explain: first, I’ve been hosting an online book club since 2014. Our long-standing theme is the future of higher education. To that end we’ve read books about academia, of course, along with titles from economics, technology, sociology, and political science, along with a series of germane science fiction novels. We hold our discussions online, based in blog posts, comments on those posts, and conversation elsewhere, from Twitter to LinkedIn and people’s own websites. It works.

Second, what does the climate crisis mean for higher education? I’ve been exploring this intersection for several years. It’s the subject of the book I’m finishing now. I believe that global warning represents perhaps the leading threat facing colleges and universities worldwide, and that we’ll struggle with this for at least the next two generations.

So let’s put these two themes together and take a look at the new IPCC report. I’ll share my impressions and you can comments here and elsewhere. Again, the focus will be on what this means for higher ed…