Sumona's Excursion Report

The name of the presenter that I heard speak was Dr. Giovanni Baiocchi from the Department of Geological Sciences from the University of Maryland. The name of the presentation that he presented was one about Mindful Consumption. This presentation took place on November 16th, 2023 in the Thurgood Marshall room in STAMP. Dr. Baiocchi had an interesting presentation/lecture. He started talking about his own work and how he had the opportunity to be the author of multiple papers and expand on his research. His own research was about the American Lifestyle and Diets Research. He spent some time talking about a paper that discussed how food security became a topic of concern in China and how grains became an essential part of the food culture. He then transitioned to talking about different climate changes that had happened or were occurring in the world currently. This led him to inform the audience about the deadly risks that came with the consistent temperature increases that were happening in the world and how that would affect us and how soon that would be affecting us. One of the main points that I found extremely interesting was when he started talking about all of the different climate anomalies, specifically, within 2023. One of the first slides that he had on the board showcased multiple graphs of the different climate changes that occurred in 2023 (indicated by a red line) and compared to other ones that had happened in the past recent years (from 2020 onwards). In these graphs, I vividly recall seeing the red line that indicated 2023 was far apart from everything else. For example, there was a graph that showcased the number of acres that had been burned by the Canadian wildfires that were ravaging all over Canada earlier this year. I agree with his stance that climate change in 2023 posed a significant difference in the world compared to the past couple years since after COVID-19 started, because I remember coming to UMD for my internship for the summer and seeing how the sky was. I remember standing and overlooking McKeldin Mall and seeing how foggy and smoky the place was. At times, I thought I saw a tinge of red in the sky. I also got an increased amount of air safety notifications on the weather app on my phone, saying that it wasn’t safe to be outside. I remember seeing pictures of places closer to the U.S.-Canada border - places like New York City - and seeing how orange the sky looked and the amount of smoke that was accumulating in the air. Another point that Dr. Baiocchi brought up a slide talking about how the melting of the ice caps in the West Antarctic was unavoidable. This then transitioned into talking about what would happen if all of Greenland’s ice melted and where the world would stand if that were to happen. On one of his slides, he had two graphs. Both of these graphs were thermal graphs showing the heat distribution around the planet. One of the graphs was showing the heat distribution around the planet in the present day while the other graph depicted how different the heat distribution would be if ice caps in the West Antarctic had melted. The second graph showed a much hotter Earth, which is extremely dangerous for all life on the planet because no organism would be able to survive that. I agree with his point about this, because he already established earlier in the presentation that 2023 was a record setting year of temperatures because of climate change due to human activity. At the rate and direction with which climate change is heading, the ice caps are melting at a fairly quick rate and this could happen in the next 100 years. Furthermore, there are still a fair amount of people in the world that don’t believe that climate change is real so it could be harder to come up with a solution that prepares us for the inevitable future of increasing temperatures. During the speech, I wasn’t able to detect any logical fallacies and I really enjoyed the way that Dr. Baiocchi presented the information and I also enjoyed the seminar overall.

Last modified: 10 December 2023