In order to further promote sustainability research, communication and action, the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future (CCSF) recently decided to branch out to the student body at Cornell and educate undergraduates, particularly freshmen and sophomores, about sustainability by co-sponsoring a series of Climate Change lectures this fall. The director of the CCSF, Prof. Francis J. DiSalvo, chemistry and chemical biology, said that the goal of the center is “to address the broad sustainability issues both on and off campus as much as we can … and to provide the opportunity for intellectual collisions between [people] who ought to collide, but don’t even know they need to collide.

Recently, the CCSF has been working to expand their efforts and increase the center’s effectiveness by extending out to various sources. For example, according to DiSalvo, “our next step, which we’re just starting on, is how do we connect to the right external organizations that would really be strategic partners for us and make things happen?”

Similarly, while students have not been an influential part of the CCSF outside of assisting faculty with research, the center has recently co-sponsored a weekly sustainability lecture series reaching out to students.

“You give them some facts, you see where their passions lie, and try to enable them to follow their passions,” DiSalvo said. “The more [students] are informed about what the facts are … the more the students clearly get that this is about them because most of these challenges are going to stick around for [their] entire lifetime.”

The first lecture of the series, “Climate Change: The Science” featured Prof. Charles Greene, earth and atmospheric sciences. With a particular interest in marine ecosystems, Greene focused on the impacts of climate change on the ocean. He expressed concern that ice cover is melting worldwide at increasing rates, and discussed the most seriously affected regions: the Arctic sea ice cover, Greenland’s ice sheet, Antarctica and the tundra in Siberia, Alaska and Canada.

While many worry that the massive melting will increase sea level, Greene has other worries. “What we are concerned about is that ice has a high albedo, [meaning] it reflects incoming solar radiation and as it melts, darker ocean water is exposed [which] leads to greater absorption of the incoming solar radiation [creating] what is commonly referred to as a positive albedo feedback loop.” In other words, the melting ice lowers the albedo, which causes warming of the ocean, thus melting more ice and continuing the cycle.

One of Greene’s other main concerns is ocean acidification. While the ocean has served as a carbon dioxide sink by absorbing some of the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, it has become more acidic as a result.

“Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of the ocean has increased by 30 percent and it is expected to become twice as acidic by the end of the 21st century,” Greene explained. “This may convert the ocean from a sink to a source of CO2 for the atmosphere.

Greene concluded by discussing a few possible solutions to the Climate Change problem. He suggested solar, wind, geothermal, tidal nuclear and hydropower as potentially cleaner sources of power. “[Though it is] not popular with a lot of people in this country, [we] have to start to consider things that may not be popular. France gets 75 percent of its power from nuclear energy. I’m not a huge proponent for nuclear power but we need to think about these things.”