From the interview, I was surprised by how Gina explained the better way to make everyone aware of the climate crisis. From her point of view, people see the world differently so if you try to explain why climate change is a concern from a generic perspective, it wouldn't make sense to them but rather, make them more skeptical on the topic. This really stood out to me because I always thought explaining the problem of climate change just involved talking about how a collective solution would help cool the earth and decrease the occurrence of other disasters. From what Gina said, this idea of mine wouldn't suffice for someone who is in a much cooler climate and hardly sees any effects of climate change on their day to day activities. Therefore, thinking about climate change and its effects on each individual would help develop better ways to communicate the problem and help people to better understand, be less skeptical and take initiative to address the problem.
I'm studying Environmental science and public policy and we have explored a lot of areas and one interesting area was the eocene period. During the eocene , the warmest sustained state of the Cenozoic, global mean annual surface temperatures were 13 °C ± 2.6 °C warmer than late 20th century temperatures" (PNAS). There were no ice sheets, sea level was about 100 meters higher than currently and atmospheric carbon dioxide was approximately 1,400 parts per million volume (ppmv). According to Wikipedia, the Eocene is not only known for containing the warmest period during the Cenozoic; it also marked the decline into an icehouse climate and the rapid expansion of the Antarctic ice sheet. The transition from a warming climate into a cooling climate began at around 49 million years ago. Considering those years back( over 49 million years), nothing was done to fix this problem. It was just a natural occurrence where an extremely warm climate transitioned to a very cool one. According to The Eocene Epoch( originally David Polly) "This (the eocene) changed oceanic circulation patterns and global heat transport, resulting in a global cooling event observed at the end of the Eocene. By the Late Eocene, the new ocean circulation resulted in a significantly lower mean annual temperature, with greater variability and seasonality worldwide"
I remember Former Donald Trump rejected the claims about climate change and said nature would fix this problem on its own and I guess my question is since humanity wasn't present to fix the climate crisis during the eocene period, can we anticipate the current climate change problems to be solved on by nature just as it happened in the past?
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I completely agree that the way to think about climate change differs for each individual — I also noticed I haven't thought of it that way. This would definitely allow people to realize the impact of climate change in their immediate environment and to truly think about what changes they can individually implement in their daily lives to stop our environment from getting worse.
The question you bring up is also super interesting, but I think that since what happened 49 million years ago was a natural phenomenon, the entire process was able to begin and end naturally. However, in this case, climate change has been caused by human activity and in such a short period of time, so I am not sure how nature might be able to "solve" it. Plus, we as humans may not exist by the time it does revert back to its natural state / equilibrium.