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Saad Amer describes what it was like to work on a report produced by the IPCC.
It...was...the...junior...high...school...TEACHER...who made him.
The career section of the journal Nature featured this article, which is probably open sourced: An IPCC reviewer shares his thoughts on the climate debate
Interviewer: Tell me about your interest in the environment.
I’ve always been very passionate about environmental justice. When I was 13 years old, with guidance from my now-retired biology teacher Patrick Murray, I did my first carbon-sequestration assessment on Long Island, near New York City in the United States, where I grew up.
I wanted to save a 40-hectare piece of land called the Fish Thicket Land Preserve, near the town of Brookhaven, from industrial development by proving that it acted as a natural sink for carbon dioxide emissions. By measuring the circumference of a tree’s trunk, I worked out its average sequestration rate, and then multiplied that number by the quantity of trees on the preserve to get an estimated total. We succeeded in saving the land.
Patrick is still one of my best friends. He was the one who encouraged me to join my school’s science-research programme. It was a supervised, independent class held during lunch periods, where around 10 kids would spend time looking into whatever ideas mattered to them. For me, that was always environmental issues...
...After my work at the Fish Thicket Land Preserve, I was invited to present my research at a conference at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy lab on Long Island. I was then invited to conduct research there and began working with Keith Jones, a physicist and climate scientist. I worked with him over the summer holiday, and would come in after school or at weekends once school started...
...After that, I applied to Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study environmental science and public policy. I come from a low-income, immigrant family. When I was accepted, I became part of the first generation in my family to go to university...
...Young people feel immense climate anxiety. We have a sense of existential doom, particularly in the face of overwhelmingly insignificant action on local, national and global levels. I think people typically underestimate what young people understand. But even when I was doing all that work on that preserve, explaining environmental concepts to eight-year-olds, they totally got it...
I’ve always been very passionate about environmental justice. When I was 13 years old, with guidance from my now-retired biology teacher Patrick Murray, I did my first carbon-sequestration assessment on Long Island, near New York City in the United States, where I grew up.
I wanted to save a 40-hectare piece of land called the Fish Thicket Land Preserve, near the town of Brookhaven, from industrial development by proving that it acted as a natural sink for carbon dioxide emissions. By measuring the circumference of a tree’s trunk, I worked out its average sequestration rate, and then multiplied that number by the quantity of trees on the preserve to get an estimated total. We succeeded in saving the land.
Patrick is still one of my best friends. He was the one who encouraged me to join my school’s science-research programme. It was a supervised, independent class held during lunch periods, where around 10 kids would spend time looking into whatever ideas mattered to them. For me, that was always environmental issues...
...After my work at the Fish Thicket Land Preserve, I was invited to present my research at a conference at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy lab on Long Island. I was then invited to conduct research there and began working with Keith Jones, a physicist and climate scientist. I worked with him over the summer holiday, and would come in after school or at weekends once school started...
...After that, I applied to Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study environmental science and public policy. I come from a low-income, immigrant family. When I was accepted, I became part of the first generation in my family to go to university...
...Young people feel immense climate anxiety. We have a sense of existential doom, particularly in the face of overwhelmingly insignificant action on local, national and global levels. I think people typically underestimate what young people understand. But even when I was doing all that work on that preserve, explaining environmental concepts to eight-year-olds, they totally got it...
I also grew up on Long Island, albeit a very long time ago, and like Dr. Amer, I had a teacher, in my case a high school English teacher who changed my life for the better.
We shit on teachers at the expense of the future.