The University of Colorado at Boulder will join more than 1,300 universities, colleges, high schools and other groups across the nation, including more than 30 institutions in Colorado, in a daylong campus event on Jan. 31 meant to focus student attention on climate change.
Gov. Bill Ritter, CU President Hank Brown and CU-Boulder Chancellor G.P. "Bud" Peterson will offer opening remarks and discuss plans to reduce climate change emissions in Colorado and at CU at 9 a.m. in the Old Main Chapel on the CU-Boulder campus.
Known as Focus the Nation, the event will include panel discussions, films, live music and class discussions at various campus locations all geared toward motivating students to learn more about climate change, its causes and how it will affect them in the near future and throughout their lives. Several world-renowned climate scientists from CU-Boulder and Colorado's federal research laboratories will be presenting and answering questions at various campus venues throughout the day.
"The University of Colorado at Boulder has been, and will continue to be, a national leader in both climate change research and in student-administration partnerships that move us all toward climate action and sustainability," said Peterson. "I am delighted that our campus community is participating in this important awareness event."
The event will kick off at 8 p.m. Jan. 30 in the ATLAS Building auditorium with the live interactive webcast "The 2 Percent Solution," which will feature a discussion about global warming solutions. The webcast's name comes from the idea that to hold future global temperature increases to a minimum, developed countries will have to cut global warming pollution by more than 80 percent from current levels by 2050, or 2 percent per year for the next 40 years.
"CU-Boulder has always been innovative and on the cutting edge in a lot of environmental areas," said Robert Hall, energy program manager with the CU-Boulder Environmental Center, which is co-sponsoring the event. "Last year our chancellor made a historic commitment to reduce the university's impact on climate change, and this school is just a powerhouse when it comes to research on climate change and how we will slow it in the future."
The major goal of the CU-Boulder event is to reach out to as many students as possible about climate change and get them talking about it, according to Galen Brown, a CU-Boulder sophomore and coordinator of the Focus the Nation group at CU, which is co-sponsoring the event.
"I hope that all students that day will in some way encounter or hear about climate change, either in their classes or by going to one of the panels or events," Brown said. "Our main goal is really to reinforce the fact that climate change is a multidisciplinary problem that is going to require multidisciplinary solutions, and the consequences of our decisions are going to trickle down through this generation and into future generations."
Some event highlights include: Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff will moderate the film screening of "The Devil Came on Horseback," a film offering first-hand accounts of the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, at 6 p.m. in Cristol Chemistry and Biochemistry room 140; Alex Budd, a 15-year-old Boulder High School student, will give the Al Gore-inspired talk "What Does a Teenager Know About Climate Change," at 12:45 p.m. in Fiske Planetarium; and several climate experts, including Konrad Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and CU-Boulder professor of geography, will present the panel discussion "Ask a Climate Expert," at 2 p.m. in Old Main Chapel.
For a complete schedule of Jan. 31 Focus the Nation events at CU-Boulder, visit /.