ABSTRACT
There is a flood of information available on climate change. It’s in the news, it’s on talk radio, and among the problem drivers we’ll discuss, it’s the one that is most likely to be pushing organizations toward “green,” or at least green messaging. Project managers, for the most part, are a pragmatic lot. We have to be. Although project management is both an art and a science, we rely on the “science part”—and our left brains-for the bigger part of our management of projects. Take earned value management as an example. This is founded on mathematical principles and uses ratios to calculate whether a project is ahead, behind, or right on schedule and budget. As project managers, we crave these methods, which bring order to the chaotic world of projects. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, even the most skeptical left-brain thinker should be able to appreciate the facts about global warming. There may be quite a bit of debate around what the true causes are, but one only has to look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (2007)1 first to answer the question on whether or not there is a significant change in the world’s climate, and second to answer the question, “why is the climate changing?” We use the words climate change because the National
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Academy of Sciencesprefers that term over global warming. The term climate change has a much broader implication than just a simple warming effect for the planet. It refers to “any distinct change in measures of climate lasting for a long period of time.”2 In other words, climate change means “major changes in temperature, rainfall, snow, or wind patterns lasting for decades or longer.”3
