China

Lia and I had a wonderful opportunity to meet a group of honors students from Zhejiang University in China through the PCC outreach program. Subsequent interaction with one of these students provides valuable insight that I wish to share:

The environment problem is not prevented from reaching us. The only problem is, it’s not highly emphasized in the public. We can get access to all kinds of information easily. In news report, there’s something about global warming issue almost every day. I guess, it’s just the lack of awareness of how severe the problem is that stops people from taking the issue seriously and doing something to change the situation. Though we saw the issue, we don’t really FEEL the issue in China actually. Another important reason from my perspective is that, in China people tend to follow a ‘up-to-down’ behavior pattern. That is to say, if there’s a national policy or some national leader’s speech, ordinary citizens started to think about what they could do to follow the trend. We’re trying to create a ‘down-to-up’, grass-root like pattern these years. But it’s still just on its way. In China, it’ll be more efficient to convince the high level authority that they should begin to do something about this vital problem.

International interaction and collaboration represents an incredible opportunity in the climate sciences and I was encouraged to see students taking the issue to heart.

Robert