Confrontation with
our mortality inevitably forces us to decide what is important in life - the
deputy director of Sciences and Exploration at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and acting director of its Earth Sciences Division, who as an astronaut
visited the International Space Station three times and walked in space six
times, Piers J. Sellers, has faced that reality and has decided that he needs
to devote what time he has left to helping humanity better understand how it
should address climate change – Robert McLean.
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| Piers J. Sellers - he has cancer and is dying, but understanding more about climate change continues to be a priority. |
I’M a climate
scientist who has just been told I have Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
This diagnosis puts me in an interesting position. I’ve
spent much of my professional life thinking about the science of climate
change, which is best viewed through a multidecadal lens. At some level I was
sure that, even at my present age of 60, I would live to see the most critical
part of the problem, and its possible solutions, play out in my lifetime. Now
that my personal horizon has been steeply foreshortened, I was forced to decide
how to spend my remaining time. Was continuing to think about climate change
worth the bother?
Read Piers J. Sellers opinion piece in The New York Times - “Cancer and Climate Change.”
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