Captions:
Music
Background: Lucy, thanks for coming here to Chifley so we can interview you.
Lucy Buxton: Thanks for having me.
Interviewer: My first question is what is your favourite marine animal?
Lucy: Well being a coral biologist I would have to say my favourite marine animal would have to be a coral but in particular a type of
coral called acropora which sometimes grows in really bright purple colours which I think is very beautiful.
Interviewer: So Lucy, what's your favourite thing about being a marine biologist?
Lucy: Well, I love being close to the ocean and obviously with the job that I do I get to spend a lot of time in the water.
But I also love figuring out about how things work and that's a key thing about being a scientist, you have to ask a lot of questions
and try to answer them, so I really love being challenged and being very curious about nature.
Interviewer: Same as me.
What made you what to become a marine biologist?
Lucy: Well, as a child I grew up close to the water and I always really enjoyed spending a lot of time running around looking in rock pools
and looking at animals and plants that lived there and that whole world of the animals that lived under the water really fascinated me.
So I decided that that was what I wanted to find out more about as a career.
So at school I chose to do science and later at university I did a degree in biology and marine biology and have been lucky enough to continue working in that field.
Interviewer: Why did you come to Australia to study marine biology?
Lucy: Well, I was really, really interested in studying corals and obviously Australia has the largest coral reef in the world so there's an
excellent place to do tropical coral biology so that's why I decided to move to Australia.
Captions:
Interviewer: So why are you so interested in climate change?
Lucy Buxton: Well, climate change is one of the biggest environmental threats of our lifetimes and I think that it's a really,
really important area that all of us have to be interested in and try to combat.
And as a scientist it's very difficult to find out the information about climate change at the rate at which climate change is actually happening to us.
So I was really, really driven to try and spend years looking at climate change and help current scientific knowledge tackle some of the
problems and find out ways that we can help reduce climate change in the future.
Interviewer: Does it really matter if the earth gets warmer?
Lucy: Well, that's a really good question because there is some historical data that suggests that the world has gone through hot and cold periods.
However, during those changes in particular really rapid changes in temperature, like what we are experiencing at the moment,
we know that a lot of animals and plants are really negatively affected because the environment that they have evolved to grow up in
suddenly changes and that causes a lot of extinctions or weaknesses or sometimes disease and food shortages for not only animals but
also for humans too should we continue to experience climate change on this scale.
So yes, I think it does really matter if the earth continues to get hot.
Interviewer: For us children, what can we do to help with climate change?
Lucy: Well one of the best things that all of us can do is to reduce the amount of fossil fuels that get released into the atmosphere.
So as children perhaps you could try and walk or cycle to school or take public transport to try and reduce the amount of cars that are on the road.
Now obviously that's not possible for everyone but at home you can use energy efficient light bulbs, reduce the amount of central heating
that you need in the winter by closing all the doors and windows and only heating up one room or even better just putting on some extra
jumpers and some woolly socks and not putting your heater on at all.
Captions:
Interviewer: Can we look at other alternatives for fossil fuels and what are they?
Lucy Buxton: Yeah, absolutely there are other alternatives to fossil fuels and this is a really large and fast growing area of technology at
the moment which I feel will only get stronger and better.
But some of the options that are available at the moment are solar energy or wind energy and also tidal energy, are all viable options instead of burning fossil fuels.
Interviewer: What will happen if we don't change the earth's current situation?
Lucy: Well, should current trends continue, with the amount of fossil fuels that humans are producing, the scientists think that climate change will continue.
So that means that we can expect hotter summers and greater increases in temperature across the world, maybe only by a couple of
degrees, but that has a huge and far-reaching effect on all the animals and plants that grow.
Captions:
Interviewer: So Lucy, is climate change really happening?
Lucy Buxton: Well, that's a really good question and it's been debated a lot over the last few years but scientists can actually prove that
carbon dioxide produced from fossil fuels is what is causing increases in temperature around the world and we are also able to look at
historical data and look at natural fluctuations in global temperatures and see how much it's changing at the moment and we believe
that these rapid changes in temperature that we call climate change is definitely happening and definitely beyond the normal fluctuations.
Interviewer: Thank you, Lucy.
Lucy: You're welcome, John.
Music