The scientific climate change is the rising of the earth's temperatures and the changes that result from that which affect most of all the most vulnerable communities in our world, the people who have the least, whether it's causing animals to die or fish to die, or crops to not be able to be grown anymore, climate changes everything encompassing both the changes in their earth's climate which relate and cause more intense natural disasters and storms and everything that kind of trickles down from that. Climate change is also a much longer term thing. So the weather is always changing, temperatures always going up and down, we have some warm summers and some cooler summers, some warmer winners, some cooler winners. And so you can look at the weather and in general the weather temperatures have been getting warmer, but it's also important to recognize that this thing called climate change is something that really has maybe a scope or span of kind of looking in the decades or hundreds of years. So it's a very long term problem and so to either be worried about climate change because of the temperature this winter or not worried about it. Next winter if we happen to get some big snowstorms is kind of missing the more complicated idea of what climate change is. Climate change, I guess my perception of it is like the earth changing, like in temperature and the repercussions that come from that. So like more severe storms, more frequent storms, like I guess I mean it would be climates around the world changing so like becoming like drier or getting more rain per year so adapting to that. Maybe human beings could change something as big as the climate. I mean I know we dig big holes on the ground and we build skyscrapers and that kind of thing, but to change the actual content of the atmosphere boggled my mind a little bit. But when I started to see the scientific evidence that if we're just talking about how much CO2 and other greenhouse gases that we've pumped out over like the last 150 years since the industrial revolution, it's pretty astounding. We've burned a lot of coal, we've burned a lot of oil and it's changed the atmosphere and that has an impact on climate. So I would say that there's more frequent changes in temperature that are more drastic and I've seen like you know days that are 70 degrees the next day it's snowing which is kind of strange you know I've never seen anything like that in previous years. How do we contribute to air pollution? Well each one of us contributes to air pollution. I did today I drove my car into work. I also turned the lights on here in my office and to the degree that the electricity that is making my lights run was generated using a fossil fuel like coal or gas or oil that contributed to global warming and pollution as well. I think it's by the things we use for example hairsprays and things like that. I'm not saying that we should stop using our cars because that's not really possible but we definitely have to be more I keep using the word aware but just aware of the fact that we are the ones causing this problem. So on campus we organize events like campus cleanups, we try and educate people on environmental sustainability, we've pushed to get more of the water fountains on campus that like fill your water bottles like reuse them and all that as well as getting more recycling and trash bins around campus to kind of like cut down on littering hopefully. Earth Day is a time for people to acknowledge that we live in a common home that is not something that we should take for granted. It's acknowledging that the way we live on the earth has a big impact on the earth and that has a return impact on us. For a long time I think we took it for granted that we could do whatever we wanted, take stuff out of the earth, put whatever we wanted onto the earth to help plants grow, to divert rivers, move water around. We were pretty impressed with ourselves to be able to affect change in the world. And Earth Day was the beginning of this recognition in Western society that maybe we should be a little more humble about our place in the world and acknowledge our reliance on our environment.