While gathering information from various scientific papers to create an infographic for my husband's presentation, I kept asking myself, if this data is true, how could our leaders not be doing something about this? Why was the population of the Earth not in an uproar? I asked friends how they felt about what was happening to our Earth and to my surprise, people did not seem to know much about what was happening. Yes, they had heard terms such as Climate Change, Global Warming and sea level rise but they did not really understand how significantly a number of these environmental and socio-economic parameters had changed.

There was a major blind spot, for while the scientists were doing all this work, their results were not really getting out to us. Not really! Not to the people like you and me who don't spend our days in a lab pouring over data, test tubes or microscopes to find those hidden clues that help to keep humanity safe. We spend our days living in the outside world, supporting our families, trying to keep them safe.

I wondered what I could do with my graphics to help communicate this information. After a science presentation, a student asked my husband “If you were 20, what would you do about the climate extremes and changes impacting the Earth?” “What would you tell your 20 year old self?” It was the first time I had ever seen my husband lost for words. This is a question we all need to ask ourselves. So I launched “What Would You Tell Your 20 yr Old Self?”

Thank You, Eva Wilkerson and Matt Jules, for forcing us to really think about this.