Joëlle Gergis - Lead Author - IPCC Sixth Assessment Report - Author of “Humanity’s Moment”

Dr. Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer at the Australian National University. She served as a lead author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and is the author of Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia. Joëlle has also contributed chapters to The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg, and Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua.

"The reason why I became a scientist, to be honest, is because of my deep love for the natural world and living in a country like Australia, which is absolutely extraordinary. You know, we have more unique plants and animals than anywhere on the planet. So more than places like Brazil or Papua New Guinea or Madagascar, these places you think of as being richly biodiverse. Australia actually tops the list, just in terms of the uniqueness of our natural environment. And so growing up in a place like that really infuses into your pores. And so I would go into these beautiful places, whether it be rainforests or the coast, which I love. And then as a young person, I was really drawn into wanting to study science. And so that's why I became a scientist. I guess I move through these landscapes in a slightly different way to say other people who maybe don't have that training, but I guess it's my love of the natural world that really is the fuel for the fire that keeps me going in this area. So I think it's fascinating, for example, that every single year trees can actually put down this growth ring and that is responding to things like temperature and rainfall. So, as long as that tree's been alive and some of these trees can grow up to 2000 years, you can have this really, really long record of climate that extends back beyond the official weather records that generally begin around about 1850 over most of the world. So it's one of these things that I just inherently find science really fascinating and being able to use these different types of records to reconstruct past climate allows us to look at these cycles of natural climate variability and then understand how they're shifting as the planet continues to warm."

http://joellegergis.com
https://climatehistory.com.au
www.blackincbooks.com.au/authors/jo-lle-gergis

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