 but we are united by our appreciation of science thank you and I'd like to take a moment to thank all of our sponsors and volunteers that made this event possible without you it really wouldn't have been possible so thank you I think this is a super exciting event and I hope you do too to start us off I'd like to introduce a distinguished professor from the University of Puget Sound of Chemistry. He is a Fulbright scholar, a Registers lecturer and a recipient of NSF funding for climate science. Steven Neshiva. I am so happy to be here and I'm so happy that all of you are here. I just have a few introductory remarks we thought we'd kick this off with with a little bit of science and and we have a great lineup of people to talk to you so in a nutshell the March for Science well it's about we're marching in support of science and evidence-based policy making that's that's what we're here all about. I'm a climate scientist so mostly what I do is I try to understand the climate and I can tell you a few things that you learn right away when you start to study the climate and the number one thing is you are astonished at how thin our lovely atmosphere really is. You're going to be walking on a two-mile route today if you can imagine which will not be difficult when you go up 9th Street if you imagine that instead of walking horizontally you walking vertically by the time you get up to two miles you will be standing above 30% of Earth's atmosphere that's all we have if you do the loop twice you'll be standing above 50% of the Earth's atmosphere. The Earth's atmosphere is a fragile thing and it needs the protection of all of humanity and especially of scientists. So I don't have to tell you guys about how carbon dioxide is changing the climate of the planet but what you might not be aware of is the pace of that change has surprised even climate scientists. We are witnessing a melting of the Arctic that no scientist was prepared to make that prediction 10 years ago. We don't even know how fast the Antarctic is going to be losing its ice so this this thing about climate change and modifying this tiny veneer of the atmosphere that we have it's happening very quickly. Just this year we cost over 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That is more carbon dioxide that has been in the air for perhaps 20 million years. That's the impact that we are having on our atmosphere and don't let any climate denier tell you any different which I'm sure he won't. You probably already know much of all this and I just want you to also know that you are backed by tens of thousands of climate scientists across the world who we are talking a very very solid scientific consensus. At the same time that scientific consensus has to have the ability to make it out to the people so that we can all collectively make decisions for the common good which means that there's a partnership between democracy and science and that is a big piece of why we are here today is to preserve that partnership which is under threat as you all well know. There's those who've tried to cast doubt on the science of climate change not through the mechanisms of peer review but through intentional distortions aka lying. These are the same yeah these are the same fake scientists who told us that cigarette smoking and acid rain are just fine. They are wrong on every count and we know that. We also know that attacks against science have reached a new threshold in our current political environment. There are debilitating cuts being made to our cherished institutions like EPA, NOAA, NASA. We're looking at denial of fact and perversion of logic in the public sphere. This is the currency of anti-science and it's why we are here we have to oppose that kind of talk. The other piece of why we're here is to promote policy making in favor of the common good and for that reason we have policy we have representatives here and we have some messages for those policymakers and it's I have a list. Yeah number one we need you policymakers you elected representatives we need you to figure out the difference between real scientists and fake ones. We can help you make that distinction okay real scientists publish in real peer-reviewed journals and fake climate scientists are in the pocket of big oil. We need you to protect the freedom of scientists to communicate with the public and I'm talking especially about scientists who work at national labs like EPA, NOAA and the like who in past administrations have suffered under censorship so that they couldn't get their tax-funded research out to be communicated to people that has to stop they have to be protected. Of course we need you to defend our cherished published federal institutions like the EPA, NOAA and NASA and also local ones like the climate impacts group that those those studies have to go on and I'll add on in addition to continued support for the study of climate change we need to prioritize local and high resolved studies modeling studies so that we can anticipate here in Washington State the effects that climate change is already having on us a certification of our of our lovely beautiful Puget Sound desiccation of our forests we need to be able to plan for all of these contingencies we need to know how much when and how to prepare for it so this is also the job of climate science. Finally I'm going to add one more we need you to recognize that the transition to a decarbonized future means saying no to all new fossil fuel infrastructure. All of us in every locality in Tacoma in states-wide federally no dollar should ever be spent ever again on another coal train a gas pipeline or a liquefied natural gas plant. We need to commit to building the green energy of the future and we need you to commit to that how about today and now. If it's any consolation to you representatives you could be guided by this certainty science has a way of being right in the end and scientists can be a very powerful force especially when provoked as you can see thank you very much