Marty brought the meeting to order
Visiting Rotarians: none
Guests of Rotarians:
- Eric introduced his daughter Collette who is visiting from USC.
- Dan introduced his daughter Allison who is a sophomore at LGHS and Elizabeth who will be at Fisher.
Grady inspired us with a bevy of quotes from Mark Twain. Here are some of them:“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco” (actually unverified but often attributed to Mark Twain)
“If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything”
“Actions speak louder than words, but not nearly as often”
“Always do right. This will gratify many and astound the rest”
“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see”
Events:
Los Gatos Creek cleanup at Campbell Park, August 24, 8:45-11AM.
Our club is supporting two events on 14 September. There will be a car show at the Palo Alto VA, and we are looking for volunteers to chaperon vets to the event. Contact Lisa if interested, and we do still need volunteers there. The car show will take place from 10AM-2PM. The other event on that day is Rise Against Hunger at the church at 111 Church Street in Los Gatos. This is a great event for almost any age volunteer.
This year, our Rebuilding Together Silicon Valley service event will be on 19 October. Sign-ups will start soon. Contact Suzanne or Doug for information or questions.
It is not too early to start planning for the 2020 Crab Fest event, and our event Chair, Suzanne, is holding a planning meeting at her home on 14 August. Please contact Suzanne if you are interested.
On Tuesday 27 August, we are having the Los Gatos Rotary BBQ, with Andrew S. taking the lead on the cooking team yet again. Tickets are $45. Tickets are available through our club site online (click the event link) and Tony is selling tickets at upcoming meetings.
We have a student from Taiwan coming through Rotary youth exchange, and we have an outgoing student from LGHS going to Taiwan. We will be asking for donations to sponsor our exchange students.
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New member intro:Amy introduced Rachelle who is a marketing manager from Allume, and previously a cultural orientation teacher for the refugee resettlement team at international rescue, and president and member of the Loma Prieta Joint Union school district
Rotary Youth Leadership Award - Our RYLA sponsored students from LGHS shared some of their highlights from their summer leadership camp.
Our speaker today was Andrew Gunther PhD in energy & resources from UC Berkeley. He founded the center for ecosystem management and restoration, and is on the board of directors of the Union of Concerned Scientists. He gave a talk on the science and history of climate change. As an intro to the subject Andrew said that all scientists are skeptics. Every scientific discovery has been met with great scrutiny and tested thoroughly over time. The history of climate science started with Joseph Fourier who first hypothesized the greenhouse effect in the 1824. One example that illustrates this is the warmth of planets in our solar system (Venus 2nd from the sun with a thick atmosphere is hotter than Mercury which is closest but has a thin atmosphere). Svante Arrhenius in 1896 predicted earth’s temperature rise based on increasing carbon in the atmosphere. Theses predictions based solely on increasing carbon were so accurate that they have held up even today. Scientists today have many proxies for measuring carbon levels over time, and one of the latest methods is using ice samples. Scientists can take samples from Antarctica where the ice goes back 800k years. From this record you can see that the carbon levels in our atmosphere today are around 2x higher than any of the highest points in the last 800k years.
Climate disruption is one of the most fundamental challenges of our time. Future generations will face problems with the availability of water, productivity of farms, forest and fisheries, increases in humidity, increases in air pollutants, the geography of disease will change (the definition of tropical disease will expand - people in FL are now getting Dengue fever), damages from storms, droughts, wildfire, property loss from sea level rise, disruption, and finally extinction of many species we know and appreciate. All of this was predicted decades ago. The political cascades are possibly the worst from climate change as humans compete for more and more scarce resources.
Andrew’s message was also uplifting. Must we change - absolutely yes, and can we change 'yes'. Humanity possesses the technical know how to solve this problem, and California is making a good start on this.
solution:
- CA has required energy efficient building codes and thus reduced energy consumption drastically while at the same time allowing our energy companies to make money by making their customers more efficient.
- Transition to carbon free electricity - we are already doing this through wind and solar. Prices for wind have dropped significantly due to economies of scale.
- Transition to electric vehicles. 7% in CA have been electric vehicles, and part of this is due to the price of batteries dropping due to economies of scale.
- Use ecosystems to absorb carbon. Stop chopping down forests and adopt regenerative agricultural systems that are carbon hungry.
- Use our market economy to help fix the problem. Put a price on carbon. Pollution is currently free, and so people pollute more than if it weren't free.
The last question is will we change? And we don't know the answer to that.
Andrew ended with an inspiring quote:
“We aren't passengers on spaceship Earth, we are the crew, and the difference is responsibility.” – Apollo Astronaut Rusty Schweikart