Social Entrepreneurship - Change.org: Youth Taking Action: Kids vs. Global Warming
I worked with middle school students from Ventura, California to install 9 foot poles along the beach warning of the potential sea level rise because of global warming.
I'm also the youth leader for the Alliance for Climate Education.
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Mr Gore has been supportive of my work and every time I see him, he always tells me that he's proud of me.
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There are still many skeptics when it comes to climate change. Even though the entire scientific community (except for maybe a few people who were bought out by oil companies) have accepted that man-made climate change is real, there are still people who believe otherwise. Big oil companies are spending millions of dollars paying off "scientists" just to go out and deny global warming. These are people who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year by Exxon and other "interest groups," and are featured in movies like "The Great Global Warming Swindle." And, unfortunately, there is a big group of people who believe what these people are saying, just because they saw it on TV.
I actually got started in this whole thing, though, in a debate with my best friend who didn't believe that climate change was real. I was so mad and frustrated that I couldn't debate with him well enough, so I went home that night and researched all that I could and made my first presentation to prove him wrong! Then, I turned what I learned into my first presentation called "The Climate Skeptic's Five Flavors of Denial" and I began to teach others how to debate with skeptics.
But I've learned since then that there are a lot of people who really don't want to debate. They aren't really "skeptics" because "skeptic" means they're open to learn the truth, even if it is different from what they think. They are "deniers" because it doesn't matter WHAT research or logic you use to talk with them, they just want to be nasty and attack you. I get criticisms all the time through the internet. It's like a safe place for people to be nasty or something. Whenever an article comes out about my global warming work, there are tons of people who get on there anonymously and make comments that I'm misinformed or brainwashed or that I'm lying to people.
These people, I usually ignore because I know that most of them are just angry or scared and lashing out to feel better. But sometimes, like when someone from Rush Limbaugh's staff wrote to me, I respond with thousands of words and pages of evidence from real scientists that shows not only that they need to read the research, but that I've done my research myself!
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