By Teresa Fang, Stentorian Editor-in-Chief
In this fantasy, it’s the last day before winter break, and she’s placing her foot in the optimal position to spring up from her seat and be the first one out the door. Her eyes — always big and round and beautiful — reflect the words coming out of her mouth. It echoes what the crowd is saying, let’s go to the beach!
In this fantasy, I can’t get through an afternoon drive without remembering all the things I’ve read on the billboards and graffiti on the road signs. Photographic memory. I look forward to getting home, full of the strangers who say “God bless you” on their cardboard signs at traffic signals and disappear into thin air on hot days because they’ve all appeared in our house. She’s watching on TV the latest updates of the barrier wall around New York City, and we giggle because it looks like a scene from that anime with the titans.
In this one, the ground trembles and that’s the signal that another glacier has been dethroned, and she looks at me with fear and confusion; I meet her with the same. We must check on our sand castles before the sea swallows them forever.
In this one, we catch picnics at the park in the windows between droughts and tornadoes so that we don’t mess up counting the millions of freckles on our faces. She takes out the vegetarian sandwiches for us to eat, and I wrinkle my nose to protest as if my bloodline has never eaten vegetables before. They’re wrapped in yellow paper, but under this sun it looks black.
In this fantasy, water tastes like smoke. We live up in mountains and underground like moles, and racism doesn’t exist because we’re all red from the freezing cold or the bitter heat. I tell her I’m dying.
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We live in extraordinary times for the understanding of science. Before January 2024, I thought I was strictly a humanities student—I was content writing about how humans interact with the environment rather than conducting climate research myself. But as I dug deeper, I realized thatlearning about a problem was just as important as being part of the solution. And, if it’s possible to be the solution, I’d rather be the solution. So, in January 2024, I also became a STEM student, creating a climate model to predict sea level rise to help coastal communities.
Global climate models (GCMs) are continually created or updated in the scientific world. These models are tuned and validated using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). These scenarios predict climate behavior based on projections of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, atmospheric concentrations, air pollutant emissions, and land use. The IPCC has ruled these scenarios for all countries from the most to the least predicted GHG emissions: RCP8.5, RCP6.0, RCP4.5, and RCP2.6.
Where are we now? In 2022, the IPCC released a report based on 14,000 scientific papers from over 300 authors, stating that Earth’s temperature will reach the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius within 20 years. This report is described by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres as an “atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” As of 2024, we are following the highest prediction pathway: RCP8.5. This predicts that by 2081-2100, temperatures will increase by 3.7 degrees Celsius, global sea levels will rise by 0.63 meters, and extreme weather will greatly increase.
I won’t overwhelm you with more numbers; you can read about them in news articles and reports. You’ve likely already heard about rising sea levels, climate protests, and species extinction due to global warming and deforestation.
Perhaps you believe every update, every statistic, and every quote you read., And, when you open the weather app on your phone and see a week of rain or above 90° temperatures, you may even shed one or two tears for our poor planet.
Or you may have attitude. It’s just the same thing every day! I get it!
Or maybe you’ll join the climate protesters for a bit. Stop cutting down our trees! Or you’ll join the counter-protest. Extremely Mad Scientist! It’s So Severe, The Nerds Are Here!
Then we’ll go back to living our lives.
Historically, climate research has been met with skepticism and denialism. When the journal Science published a letter signed by 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences in May 2010, it began with, “We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything.”
But political exposure twists the interpretation:
2011. Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. “We don’t know what’s causing climate change, and the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try and reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.”
2015. US Senator Ted Cruz. “Any good scientist questions all science. If you show me a scientist who stops questioning science, I’ll show you someone who isn’t a scientist.”
2016. Donald Trump wanted to eliminate all climate research done by NASA. “Mr. Trump’s decisions will be based upon solid science, not politicized science,” said his top NASA adviser Bob Walker.
2024 is still the same. “Can you imagine, this guy says global warming is the greatest threat to our country?” Trump referred to President Joe Biden at a rally in June, which had the hottest June in recorded history across the globe. “Global warming is fine. In fact, I heard it was going to be very warm today. It’s fine.”
Now, the problem isn’t simply misinformation and believability about climate science. Yes, science produces findings that reveal something true (or close to true) about nature based on evidence. But what we need the general public to know is not a better understanding of those findings, but a better understanding of what makes those findings distinctive.
Some believe the philosophy of science is based on the idea that the “scientific method,” if rigorously applied, always produces good science. Twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper warned against this, citing the problem of demarcation: a theory can’t be correct unless it can be proven wrong. In other words, it might be that people don’t believe in climate change because they don’t recognize its effects in their daily lives.
Conducting research is not something that anybody can jump into and do, but it was through experiencing research firsthand that I knew the severity of climate change. My classmates, who are also conducting climate research, now know that. We are lucky to have the resources and opportunity to do that.
We can’t pretend that our efforts won’t be heard because we’re just one person. I can’t “solve” climate change,” and neither can a whole country. But I can recognize the differences in my life that climate change is making, and I am not comfortably numb enough to sit still and live with what I don’t like. At its core, what makes science distinctive is its purpose to make people care about things bigger than themselves. It’s not the subject or method of inquiry but the values and behavior of those engaged in it that make science matter.