[GreenLantern]

I lost my job last spring due to budget cuts by the provincial government. They blew up our Climatology department and everyone was either let go or re located. I took this very personal, but my Supervisor laid some wisdom on me a few weeks ago while we were hiking up Mount Allen to do some data logging at our ridge line station. He told me a story about a feller out of the University of Manitoba. The guy once showed him a list of topics and titles he had produced over the course of 20 years to gain grants for his research. Not a single tittle included polar bears except the very first, and at the end of the day all he did was research polar bears. Climate change research has been on going longer than most people think, it just hasn't been labelled the same. The "buzz words" are constantly changing and always will be. At the end of the day, my Supervisor and those like him will always be researching the earth's natural processes like Hydrology, and in turn the effect that everything under the sun including humans has on it. To not include them would be foolish, it'd be cheating your research.

I had the pleasure of accidentally running into world renowned Physicist Nigel Smith a few nights ago at a Japanese restaurant. We were seated at the same table and I over heard them talking science, so naturally I joined it. He came to the pub with us for a few beer after and we got into the politics of it. He elaborated how much scrutiny the world of physics under goes with research and the difficulty of obtaining grants. So it isn't just climate change research that gets hit with adversity, its every field of science. For some reason though my research is the scape goat of the day.

For these reasons I am not allowed to use the words "climate change" in my thesis tittle, instead we are looking at "climate variability and its effect on natural hydrologic processes."

But at the end of the day, I am going to be researching climate change, and so will those after me.