The Question: Some scientists predict that climate change will cause texas to endure decades of drought and dramatically change business and life in this state. Do you plan to make your adult life in texas if it suffers that fate?

I would. I mean, Texas weather is always crazy anyway. So what’s a drought going to do? It’s kind of something that you just take as it comes, and it just depends on how severe it will be. So I would think I would plan to stay and then take it from there. Just assess what happens.

Brianne Strong, Pharmacy graduate student

I think we’ve experienced droughts before, and if it gets more severe, then we’ll deal with it.

Jill McConnell, Pharmacy graduate student

As far as what I have planned for the future, that’s hard to say. As far as how the drought will affect the government and economics and whatnot, I think the drought will have a drastic effect on at least the biosphere of Texas. I’m a biology major, so at least for plants — maybe animals — it will have a drastic effect on the ecosystem. It will probably have drastic reductions in certain plants or maybe certain animals. I also think, economically, it will increase the cost for agriculture substantially, but with that there could be potential innovations for how to subsidize it or how to fix that situation. For me, I am hopefully going into the medical field, so I can’t say definitively where I will be in the next 10 years, but it definitely is a big issue for Texas.

Pierr Bojxahi, Biology senior

Actually, it never really affected us that much, so I don’t really see why not. It’s just never really affected me that much. I’ll probably still live in Texas, and I can withstand the heat, so it’s not really that much of a problem.

Melody Hwang, Architecture sophomore

 Well, honestly, I’m not planning to have my adult life planted in Texas for other reasons, but theoretically, if I were to live in Texas, and I knew that predicted droughts were going to get worse, ideally I’d probably move elsewhere, because our aquifers are getting depleted and our groundwater management resources are being stressed. With the Texas Legislature making predictions on droughts that are based off of a 50-year drought period, that actually doesn’t fairly represent what the drought would be.

Nathan Guus van Oort, Geological sciences senior