CLEMSON UNIVERSITY — Scientists need to play a more integral part in the public process to effectively address global warming, author Bryan Norton told a crowd at the Clemson University Outdoor Laboratory on Saturday.

Norton, the author of “Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management,” said the responsibility for taking care of the planet can not fall solely on the shoulders of the general public. The responsibility must be shared other levels of society, including politicians and the leaders of college institutions, he said.

“If we are going to respond to global climate change, we have to develop a much more nuanced approach to the scale at which things are happening,” Norton said after his presentation.

He was just one of the college professors who traded ideas during the three-day Human Flourishing and Restoration in the Age of Global Warming conference that will end today in Clemson. Norton also is a professor of philosophy, science and technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology.The goal of the conference was to discuss ecology, justice and living well in a new world climate.

Allen Thompson, an assistant professor in the Clemson department of philosophy and religion, helped plan the conference. More than 70 people registered for the event, and most of them were academics.

“The quality of the discussion was extraordinary,” Thompson said. “There was a broad representation of philosophical schools of thought.”

More than two dozen people already have presented their views about global warming during the conference. The speakers answered questions about certain aspects of their research after their presentations.

James Barilla, an assistant professor of English at the University of South Carolina, said he was impressed with the conference and learned a lot of useful information.

“I wanted to get a better sense of what issues people were talking about in terms of global warming,” he said.

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, a philosophy professor at LeMoyne College in New York, and Breena Holland, an assistant political science professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, also helped plan the conference.

Sessions today are free and open to the public at the Outdoor Lab. The first session of the day is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. and the last at 12:30 p.m.