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I know that when Native students discover the amount of good that they can do for their people in the biomedical sciences with things such as among the Navajo people,
the Crow people, others, being able to help run down and address some of the causes of diabetes and
some of the ways to treat some of these monster strains of tuberculosis that are getting loose among our people.
My grandfather had tuberculosis. It's just as a Native person, he didn't have the genes to make him immune to it.
When that call went out, when people, when students recognize the amount of good they can do, there were a lot of
Native students who got into biomedical science for that reason and I really hope that they will do the same thing in climate science. It's not just Native students.
African Americans, for example, many African Americans lived along the U.S. coasts, sea level rise is a big problem. We need to figure out how to address that too.
It's not the melding of the Greenland and the Antarctic ice caps, it's certainly not the melting of the ice in the Arctic Ocean.
Archimedes told us a long time ago that if you put ice that's floating in water and you melt it, it doesn't actually raise sea level,
but what is happening is the stuff that's sitting on land in Antarctica and Greenland, as it melts that is raising sea level. Also, just the fact,
the thermal expansion of the ocean as the planet warms up, water that warms up just expands, so even if no more ice would be dumping water into the ocean,
the expansion is raising sea level. That may be the bigger component of it right now.
Being able to help model that and help figure out some ways to address that will help communities such as many
communities of African Americans who live on the U.S. coast. Chicanos who live in the Southwestern portion of the United States do not need any help
from me understanding what the issues are with drought. So there are a lot of opportunities here, I think, for people from lots of underrepresented backgrounds.