Dr. Phil Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center, asks for support for climate science during the pandemic. He argues climate change remains the defining challenge of the century, and that scientific infrastructure built now will protect both current and future generations.
Chapters
I'm Phil Duffy, president of Woods Hole Research center, and I'm speaking to you today to ask you to support our work. Why should you support action against climate change when we're all consumed, and understandably so, by the global health crisis which we're experiencing now? Well, the answer is simple. The answer is that when coronavirus passes, which it will, climate change will still be the number one challenge of the 21st century. The patchwork responses that we've seen to coronavirus illustrate very clearly that policies and responses based strongly on science are far more effective than policies based on wishful thinking, far more effective than policies which put politics or economics ahead of addressing the underlying problem. And the same is true of climate change. We were unprepared for coronavirus because we didn't invest. We didn't invest in preparation. We didn't invest in our scientific infrastructure. Well, let's not make the same mistake with climate change. Your support will help us all today and will be a gift to future generations as well. Thank you for supporting the power of science at the Woods Hole Research Center.
