The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) will be hosting a series of talks on the hot topic of global warming on Second Nature, its archipelago in the virtual world of Second Life. A group of environmentalists want to hold a series of talks on global warming, open to people around the world. Yet air travel is a huge contributor to climate change. What’s to be done? Enter Second Life, of course.The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) will be hosting a series of talks on the hot topic of global warming on Second Nature, its archipelago in the virtual world of Second Life. The conference will coincide with the United Nations conference on the subject underway in Bali, according to reports.The talks, free to all comers, will feature speakers such as Simon Buckle, director of climate change policy at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, on Dec. 11 and George Monbiot, author of “Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning,” on Dec. 13. Second Life users can join the conference via slurl.com/secondlife/SecondNature/218/213/28. The NPG certainly isn’t the first organization to have a go at hosting a gathering in the world of Second Life. In October 2006, for example, Sun and IBM held separate meetings in Second Life, both of which were attended by former InfoWorld technology evangelist Jon Udell. He wasn’t particularly impressed with the medium, though. “In the IBM event, I found myself in a breakout session chatting with strangers about a topic whose premise I disagreed with. That would be unproductive enough in the real world. Because we lacked a synchronous voice channel, real identities, and sufficient emotional bandwidth, it felt even less productive here,” he wrote.I’ve only dabbled in Second Life, but I’m the same page here as Jon was: It doesn’t strike me as an ideal medium for conferences or talks. For a talk, where only one or a couple of presenters are speaking at any time to an audience, one would think a Webcast would suffice. Attendees could ask questions in real time via a messaging function.As for an interactive conference, well, it becomes trickier. Telepresence remains a promising means of engaging with other human beings remotely, though for the time being, they’re impractical for the average home user (know anyone with a telepresence system in his or her basement?). The systems are evolving, however, to the point that a small system could be set up in a CXO’s corner office. From my perspective, NPG is to be commended for pushing the envelop here. Even if the conference doesn’t prove overly successful because of the Second Life medium, I appreciate the fact that the group is using Second Life to make a point about air travel’s impact on the environment, as well as a point about technology’s potential to combat the phenomenon.Ted Samson is a senior analyst at InfoWorld and author of the Sustainable IT blog. Subscribe to his free weekly Green Tech newsletter. Technology Industry