Recently, I was having a conversation with my great aunt and uncle, and it came to the topic of climate change. My great aunt studied microbiology and is no stranger to science and the scientific method. I was a little surprised when she said that she doesn't believe that climate change is happening. She elaborated by saying she believes that we are polluting the environment and harming ecosystems, but climate change is simply not happening or at least not on the scale scientists believe. She thinks we should reduce, reuse, and recycle, pick up trash, clean the oceans, and find green energy sources, but she doesn't believe in anthropogenic climate change. To make things a little bit worse, she just bought a house near Charleston, South Carolina, about 20 feet above sea level. Her reasoning behind her argument seemed odd to me. She told me about a particularly bad flood in Baltimore when she was younger; the water was coming right up to people's doorsteps. But this was decades ago, and we are still having the same bad floods. Scientists can cry global warming and climate change, but nothings really changed she told me. I believe my aunt was cherry picking specific examples in her memory to fit a conclusion she already held. I also think that change happens slowly enough over a person's lifetime that it's easy for someone to not realize how different things have become. The SGC program taught me to look past bad logic, examine all the data, and then come to a conclusion; it taught me good science and the value of the hypothetico-deductive process. I can't help but think about what my aunt's house in Charleston is going to be like fifty years from now. How bad will the flooding be then?
SGC has helped me so much more than I could have realized when I decided to join it. After taking class about the fossil record last year, I decided to pursue a minor in Paleobiology. A few of the required courses for this minor are geology courses which spend a lot of time talking about the same concepts I've learned about in Scholars: carbon emissions, climate change, extreme weather events, etc. Whenever the unit on climate change comes back around, I know I can breathe easy; I've been learning about it for a year and a half now. Thanks to SGC and the fantastic teaching by Dr. Holtz and Dr. Merck, I know the science behind climate change and understand it thoroughly. I find it fascinating, especially when considered in the context of Earth's history, and this fascination has really connected me to my Paleobiology minor.
Learning about logical fallacies and flawed reasoning has proved invaluable in my supporting courses as well. In BSCI222, my professor likes to hold genetics ethics debates about different case studies. Applying what I’ve learned about logic in SGC to those debates has helped me formulate better arguments and form strong beliefs about genetics and its relationship with society. This is especially important to me, since I plan to pursue a career in genetic counseling, and to have clear ideas about the ethics of genetics and to be able to back those ideas up with solid logic will help me down the line. Additionally, I've found the hypothetic-deductive method to be extremely useful in my CHEM232 and CHEM242 labs. In those labs, I perform experiments, collect data, and then interpret that data to determine the success of my experiment. My final product in lab might look like it's supposed to, but it's only after I analyze the data that I can assess how pure it is. Using the scientific method allows me to accurate and independent conclusions based off data instead of my observations and how I perceive the world around me.
I've always liked working on my own, but being in a living and learning community like Scholars changed that a little bit. Most of my friends are in SGC with me and they've made the whole experience way more enjoyable. I currently live on the opposite side of campus from the Cambridge Community Center, where class is held. It's a bit far, but making that walk with my friends every Monday makes it more bearable. Showing up to class, even when it was online, and being able to hang out with them made SGC fun. Activities, field trips, and learning about something as gloomy as climate change was much easier because of that.
Prior to being in SGC, I hadn't realized just how important climate change is. I didn't even put Science and Global Change as my preferred choice when I joined Scholars. My first pick was the Life Sciences program, but I'm glad that I didn’t get in. This program has challenged me to open my eyes to the significance of climate change and realize that it's not a singular event but a continuous process that's been acting through the same forces throughout the history of life on this planet. Anthropogenic climate change might be far more dramatic than anything we've seen before, but ocean acidification, sea level rise, and all the other forces of climate change are the same things that acted on trilobites hundreds of millions of years ago. They're the same things that acted on the dinosaurs throughout the Mesozoic, and they're the same things that acted on early primates during the Paleogene. It's not just the greenhouse effect like I was taught in elementary and middle school. Climate change is part of a complex and interconnected system, and that realization has changed the way I view the world.