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Date
I am going to purposely stay away from the polarity of the global climate change debate between the advocates and the deniers. It doesn’t do much good to politicize the debate. Individuals need to make up their own minds as to what they believe and what they don’t believe. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) out this week certain has caused some polar opposition, excuse the pun.
Should I be asking, as Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood pictured above) did, “Do you feel lucky?” Are the weather anomalies you witnessed over the past year or so, just that, anomalies? Or, are they the result of a cycle the Earth is going through right now, just as the Earth has gone through in the distant past? If they are part of the life cycle of the Earth, is there nothing that can be done? How about another (compound) question, have we contributed enough greenhouse gases to either; (1) accelerate the cyclical nature of our weather patterns, or (2) are we the direct cause of the global climate change? And another, if you can do something about what is happening to the climate, would you?
When you think about it, those are some pretty “heavy” questions. Let’s look at it from this perspective, one which business and we as consumers understand. That perspective is saving energy, saves money, and, by the way, helps protect the valuable resources of the Earth, like fossil fuels.
How about a win-win for project managers and it keeps us out of the political debate? I don’t want to sound anti-environment, because I am not. I am quite the opposite. What I do want to convey, however, and we’ve conveyed it before, whether you are a skeptic or not, the anomalies seem more to continue, making them the “new norm.” At least that’s been my observations of the last few years. According to the entry page http://www.un.org/climatechange/blog/2014/03/31/ipcc-report-severe-and-pervasive-impacts-of-climate-change-will-be-felt-everywhere/ “Observed impacts of climate change have already affected agriculture, human health, ecosystems on land and in the oceans, water supplies, and some people’s livelihoods. The striking feature of observed impacts is that they are occurring from the tropics to the poles, from small islands to large continents, and from the wealthiest countries to the poorest.”
Think about it, how was your winter, normal? Mine, in the northeastern United States, sure wasn’t. Although I have been through worse, winter 1970/1971, it has been over 40 years. Maybe it is a once in every 40 years. I don’t think so, and the reason the other observations like, continuing severe drought in areas that produce a lot of our food, “most components of the cryosphere (glaciers, ice sheets and floating ice shelves, sea, lake and river ice, permafrost and snow) have undergone significant changes during recent decades,” and so on. There is too much going on just to ignore it. The report goes into great detail on the observations made.
About that win-win. There will be projects all along the spectrum of green we talk about in our book, from green by intent, those projects like alternative energy resource construction, to green in general, like a software release. These projects need to be managed, so that both the product of the project and the process of managing the project can utilize the scarce resources (and perhaps begin to mitigate some of the effects of climate change) available to the best of our abilities. The only thing we need is to be aware of is how we can manage those projects in a responsible way. I’m not saying that we aren’t managing in a responsible way now; I’m just saying that we need to consider the greenality* of the projects. It is a continual learning process for all of us. It takes an understanding of what we can and cannot do to manage with more greenality. It is an education, but I believe in our 5 assertions on which we based EarthPM. Two of those are; “A project run with green intent is the right thing to do, but it will also help the project team to do things right” and “An environmental (sustainable) strategy for a project provides added opportunity for success of both the project and the product of the project.” We can and should make a difference.
*For those of you who may not be familiar with the word greenality, we define it as “the degree to which an organization has considered environmental (sustainability) factors that affect its projects during the entire project life cycle and beyond.”
Posted
by
Dave Shirley
on: April 02, 2014 04:43 PM |
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