I'm Kurt Steger and I'm a professor at Paul Smith's College in Northern New York in the
U.S. and happy to be here down under doing some climate research over in Perth and some
of the Lake Districts there and also touring the southern part of Australia to promote my
book Deep Future.
What I try to do is sort of clear away the space and the big discussions about whether
climate change is happening or not and sort of introduce the cutting edge of climate research
now which is basically showing the big picture of the kind of changes we're setting in motion
today. It turns out that instead of just lasting a few decades or even centuries as
we thought our effects now are much larger than we had realized before and are probably
going to last for thousands of years which can sound a little depressing and overwhelming
in one sense but the other side of the coin is it shows the incredible power we have now
to affect the future and affect climate over long time periods and just to show that we
have some very important choices to make in the next few decades as to what kind of energy
sources we use to run our economies and those choices are going to echo on down through
the ages.
One of the most surprising things that I found in researching this book was taking my perspective
as a climate historian who's used to thinking of large changes over long time periods like
ice ages coming and going and natural global warming to see that our effects in the future
can actually be long enough to be on those same kinds of time scales like for example
the amount of carbon dioxide we've already released into the atmosphere is probably going
to last long enough in the atmosphere to interfere with future ice ages. So that really caught
my attention as a climate historian to realize the kind of a power we have to make those
kinds of a decision.
Really surprisingly as I get older I'm more used to reading some of the old style of writing
from the 1800s which was always kind of hard to chew on when I was younger and as I travel
the world especially in kind of tropical areas and also down here I realized that Charles
Darwin as a young fella did a travelogue of his journeys on the voyage of the Beagle the
ship that he sailed around the world on and was exploring what to him was unknown ecosystems
and species and it's surprisingly readable so if you travel to any of these places yourself
if you bring Darwin's book from when he was a young fella and describing the landscapes
and the people and animals and plants that he saw along the way and then see it again
for yourself I think it's really inspiring so I recommend the voyage of the Beagle by
Charles Darwin.
