This year I am launching my newest endeavor: astronomers in climate change. This is a long-term project that aims to familiarize readers with climate change through the lens of biological evolution in the context of astrophysics. What a mouthful! But why does it matter:

It is through my own experience in studying cosmology, astrophysics, and the evolution of life on earth that I have arrived at a hybrid perspective on the proper course for humanity to not extinct itself.

While still in development, in the coming months you can expect to start finding more content that takes a deep dive into the key aspects of climate change, and puts that in a relatable, human context using astronomy. For example, astronomy as a science is fluent in considering events across orders of magnitude of timelines, events that occur of the span of seconds to billions of years. This allows astronomers to play out scenarios across multiple timelines. For me, this converges with climate change when I consider biological evolution and how long it took for all the biodiversity on this planet to emerge. Billions of years of evolution have led to fascinating organisms like the venus fly trap, hammerhead sharks, and worms that can survive incredibly harsh environments. Plants, sharks and worms are species that each have, at a minimum, tens of millions of years of evolution on modern humans.

Then, consider how quickly humans have altered the climate of this planet. Barely 200 years have passed since humans started pouring CO2 and other gases into the atmosphere during the Industrial Revolution.

This, to me, screams hubris. At the very basic level, humans have artificially elevated themselves above other organisms that have actually been evolving to survive on this planet, believing our technology makes us superior. However, playing this out across an astronomical timeline very swiftly and simply results in the destruction of the ecosystem. No question, with intense confidence, I can say as a scientist and educator that humans will absolutely make the planet uninhabitable without a major intervention.

To leave on a positive note: I am forced to have faith in human ingenuity. Climate change can be ameliorated, and the planet can be saved from a boiling death. When COVID19 hit the world, the world changed over the matter of weeks. This gives me confidence and hope that humans can come together to make the right decisions, eventually. We may have to wait until we really have our feet to the fire, as in with the pandemic, but it is still proof that humans have the capability to be adaptable and ingenious.