Climate change is a huge topic and that’s why Texas Tech has been hosting climate panels for 2 years now.
“For so long, we’ve kind of thought of climate change as this issue that only really matters to us in the distant future, but what we’ve recognized is that we’re starting to experience its impacts right here in the place that we live,” says Texas Tech Climate Scientist, Katharine Hayhoe.
Experts say we’ve been feeling the impact of climate change with events like the 2011 drought and the fact that we just experienced the warmest October on record.
“Many people don’t realize that we’ve been studying climate change as scientists for about 200 years. We’ve been studying how this thing is happening, why it’s happening, and especially what it means to us and the places where we live. How does the climate affect our water, our agriculture, our economy. These things are really important and we do a lot of this work here at Tech, but sometimes we don’t talk,” Hayhoe says.
To change that, Texas Tech hosts panels, where they discuss different topics and how they relate to climate. The most recent one was about communication.
“We bring together experts from the University and often from the community as well to talk about why this matter issues to us. They are an opportunity to bring in new ideas,” Hayhoe says. “On our panels, we always try to put people together who haven’t really talked to each other before and get different perspectives.”
With the cold months just around the corner, experts say winters are actually warming and our average snow amounts are decreasing. This is based on a 30 year climate average.
“A lot of the students here at Tech don’t talk about climate change. It’s not a big conversation point. I found that even when I do talk about it, it’s just not really perceived well, so I think it would be important for more students to get involved with seminars like this to just learn about it. They don’t necessarily have to care or even change their mindset, but I think it’s important to learn more about climate change in general,” says Kylie Naughton, a senior student at Texas Tech.
The panel is open to students, faculty, and anyone in the community. They take place on the first Tuesday of every month with a new topic.
