More than 6,000 participants attended “Heating Up: The Energy Debate,” Gustavus Adolphus College’s Nobel Conference on climate change, Oct. 2-3, in St. Peter, Minn.

Speakers at the Gustavus event argued for individual and collective action to address the “carbon footprint”—energy consumption’s impact on the global climate. The consensus seemed to be that if humans don’t deal with climate change now, they’ll deal with it later.

Hope amid change

“Signs of climate change are evident,” said Steven Chu, 1997 Nobel laureate in physics. “But alternatives in energy sources give us options.” Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is a professor of physics and cellular and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley .

Chu is optimistic: “We don’t need 100 percent certainty. Most scientists are 95 percent certain CO2 (carbon dioxide) is impacting climate change, and we already know sea levels are rising, water shortages are increasing and other factors indicate the direction we’re going. If there were even a 50 percent chance your house would burn down in five years if you didn’t take some reasonable action, wouldn’t you take the action?”

“We really are at a crisis point,” said James E. Hansen, the lead climate scientist and director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. “Special interests who are more interested in short-term profits are making it hard to make this clear. And an intelligent person can still ask why this is a problem. There were huge climate changes in the past, so who are we to say today’s human-made changes are any different?”

Hansen, who also serves as an adjunct professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University, New York, is perhaps best known for his 1980s testimony to congressional committees. Initially discredited by government officials, his testimony on how humans impact climate change is now largely accepted.

“There needs to be a price put on carbon emissions,” he said. “We’re in a struggle against ignorance and it’s unfortunate that this has become political. It seems to me that conservative people should be at the head of the line as far as preserving. We have the technology to solve the problem. I think we are also in a struggle against greed.”

‘We will run out’

“Anyone [who] says oil production can go on forever is either a mad man or an economist,” joked Kenneth S. Deffeyes, professor emeritus of geosciences, Princeton [N.J.] University. Deffeyes is the author of Hubbert’s Peak (Princeton University Press, 2001) and Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak (Hill and Wang, 2005), which discuss the consequences for the U.S. and the world of reaching the peak of oil production.

“While economists want oil to last, we have passed the peak of oil production. ... The price will only continue to rise,” he said. “And we will run out.”

Polar explorer Will Steger added: “If greenhouse gases and climate change continue in the direction of the past 20 years, world maps will need to be redrawn and there may even be wars over fresh water in this century.”

To see video coverage of this year’s Nobel Conference at the Gustavus Web site.

The college’s 2008 Nobel Conference, “Who Were the First Humans?” is set for Oct. 7-8.

Things you can do:

• Learn about climate change at these Web sites: Global Warming 101, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and An Inconvenient Truth.

• Write and ask your legislators to enact federal regulations to reduce greenhouse gases.

• Seek local and renewable energy alternatives like wind and sun.

• Buy energy-efficient appliances and improve your home’s insulation.

• Use natural light and refit lighting fixtures with LED lights.

• Plant trees.

• Recycle.

• Walk or ride a bicycle.

• Support research on ways to use grasses and biomass as alternative energy sources.