Features
I WANT MY STUDENTS TO BE
ALARMED But marine geologist Pam REID’68 sees hope on the climate front By Janet Sailian Photo by Jack Fell
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lobal warming is no abstraction to Pam Reid. The marine geologist at the University of Miami only has to survey the nearby coastline after a king tide, or look out at streets flooded after heavy rains, to see evidence of sea-level rise and worsening storms caused by rapid climate change. And she is urgently trying to reach younger generations with a warning of imminent catastrophe if we, collectively, fail to take action very soon. Pam teaches environmental oceanography with an emphasis on “Carbon Dioxide, the Oceans and You” for non-science majors. “I want my students to be alarmed, to talk about the problem and understand that the planet is in jeopardy,” she says. “As a class project they each have to write a newsletter aimed at a student organization, their neighbours or another peer group, describing climate problems and proposing solutions.” The good news, according to Pam, is that although we are likely in the beginning of the sixth mass extinction planet Earth has experienced, it’s not too late to turn this massive ship around. “A lot of people like me believed it was ‘game over’
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in terms of cutting carbon emissions, but then I read Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by American environmentalist Paul Hawken and colleagues, and it gave me hope,” she says. The book emerged from Project Drawdown, a non-profit organization founded in 2014 to provide a blueprint for what can be done around the world to reverse global warming. “Drawdown contains a clear road map, not only for slowing carbon emissions, but for reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Pam notes. “Eighty of the 100 science-based solutions proposed could be implemented today.” According to Pam, high carbon dioxide levels resulting from massive volcanic eruptions millions of years ago were a likely cause of several global mass extinctions. Today, 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that skyrocketing levels of carbon dioxide are a result of human actions and are causing our current accelerating climate change. Those activities include reliance on fossil fuels, industrial farming, use of plastics and rampant food waste. “Carbon dioxide is just one of the serious greenhouse gases—methane is another—that are accelerating climate change,” she says. The results are not only a warming cli-
