Interview with Aaron Pope
Prepared by Morgan Petiti
On Tuesday April 13 at 4:15p.m., my partner and I conducted an interview
with Aaron Pope at the California Academy of Sciences. Aaron Pope has been
interested in the climate for a long time. He majored in environmental
studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. Following college,
he went to Washington D.C. and worked for a non-profit organization in
their environmental sector. He arrived and has worked for the Academy of
Sciences for two and a half years now. He was able to provide us with the
scientific point of view of global warming with many examples, including
metaphors. One metaphor that he used was the carbon dioxide is like the
feathers to a down bed, the more feathers you add, the hotter it gets.
When we conducted the interview, our interviewee, Aaron Pope, was very
informational. Mr. Pope was excited to answer the questions that we
presented to him. He enjoyed the fact that there are people out there who
care about the environment the same way he did. He was bubbly and answered
every question the best way he possibly could, without making it way too
confusing with all the scientific terms. My partner and I were treated
very well. He viewed us as though we were adults, not little children. He
was not impatient and took time and cared about what we were asking.
When conducting the interview, there were some questions that I already
was expecting a certain answer. One answer that my partner and I received
was that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was the highest
that it has ever been. After reading our informational book on global
warming and seeing that statistic in the book, I assumed that Mr. Pope was
going to answer the same way as the book did. Another answer that I
expected to learn was that we as human beings should not try to get rid of
all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but just try to lower the amount
of it. If we got rid of it all, then we would die because not only us, but
the Earth itself needs the carbon dioxide to survive.
When the interview was going on, there were many things said that I did
not ever expect to learn from an interview with global warming. For
starters, even though the media says scientists have not made an unanimous
decision about global warming, it is proven that 95% of scientists all
agree that there is a climate change occurring. These scientists are
people in NASA, the scientists for the CIA, FBI, all people who are the
best at what they do. Another amazing fact that was presented is that the
media gets paid about 100 million dollars by companies to tell the people
watching the news that global warming does not actually exist. Another
very surprising fact was that the last time that the amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere was this high was about 65 million years ago
when the dinosaurs went extinct. Today we are actually higher in the
amount of carbon dioxide then the atmosphere had then.
Overall, the interview was an amazing experience. My partner and I learned
information that neither of our books told us. We both walked out of the
interview feeling that we gained so much more information than we had
already new. The really amazing things were the facts that people not
watching the news would know, such as the bribes to hide the truth from
people and the almost unanimous decision that scientists have with global
warming. It was a pleasure interviewing someone who has been interested in
the climate for a long time and wants to help preserve it and show people
that the change is needed. He actually said after World War II, The United
States made the change needed, showing that people are capable of making
the change necessary. The action that Mr. Pope says needs to be done is to
get the political people to agree that there is something wrong and for
them to help get people to make the change. We would need all six billion
people to make the change to truly see the difference.
