[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LATIF: Okay, I'm just gonna start. Tree walks into a bar.

LULU: [laughs] Okay.

LATIF: Bartender asks, "What'll you have?"

LULU: Uh, yeah.

LATIF: Oh, you wanna guess?

LULU: Well, no, I'm just—I'm already dismayed by your concept because trees, as I last checked, can't walk. They're rooted to the ground.

LATIF: Just go with it, Lulu. Just go with it. Come on! Okay, a tree walks into a bar.

LULU: Okay. Yeah.

LATIF: The bartender says, "What'll you have?"

LULU: Uh, I've got a branching decision ahead of me but I'll go with a lager?

LATIF: Anything but a lager.

LULU: Oh, anything but a lager, okay.

LATIF: That's right.

LULU: [laughs]

LATIF: Another one.

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: Three dendrochronologists walk into a bar. And ...

LULU: Okay, wait.

LATIF: Yeah?

LULU: Dendrochronologists are people who look at dendrites in your brain!

LATIF: No, they're people who study tree rings.

LULU: Oh! They just look at the rings inside a tree stump?

LATIF: That's what they do, that's what they study.

LULU: Okay, so three dendrochronologists walk into a bar. And?

LATIF: I mean, that's—that's not a joke. That's the beginning of the story.

LULU: [laughs] Okay.

LATIF: The rest of the story is basically three tree ring scientists walk into a bar, and as the night goes on, and as the talk gets a little boozier, they comes up with this kind of hare-brained idea to take this one particular set of tree rings, to put it next to a seemingly unrelated thing, but in doing that, they start to see all kinds of new things that they've never seen before, that maybe nobody has ever seen before, including an invisible hand shaping the history of our planet and the history of—of us!

LULU: All right. Well, before we take off on this wild tale, should we do the who we are thing?

LATIF: I'm Latif Nasser.

LULU: I'm Lulu Miller.

LATIF: This, of course, is Radiolab.

LULU: All right, so set it up for us. Where does it all start?

LATIF: Okay, so we're in Tucson, Arizona, at a bar called Tiger's Taproom.

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: It's more than 100 years old. And it's sort of famous locally for its very old bartender, who has been serving drinks there since 1959!

LULU: [laughs] Cool! All right, now I'm picturing Gandalf, like, serving drinks to these three tree ring scientists sitting there looking at the bar, counting the rings on the bar.

LATIF: [laughs]

VALERIE TROUET: We're not freaks! [laughs]

LULU: [laughs]

VALERIE TROUET: We go to a bar and we go and drink. We don't count rings.

LATIF: This is Valerie.

VALERIE TROUET: Valerie Trouet.

LATIF: Scientist number one.

VALERIE TROUET: I'm professor of dendrochronology at the University of Arizona.

LATIF: Which is in Tucson.

VALERIE TROUET: Where you would not necessarily expect a tree ring lab because there's not many trees around.

LATIF: But kind of weirdly, she says this is actually where the modern field was born.

VALERIE TROUET: Because the first dendrochronologist was actually an astronomer.

LATIF: Who was studying the sun.

VALERIE TROUET: Andrew Ellicott Douglass. That happened because ...

LATIF: He thought to himself ...

VALERIE TROUET: Well trees, they're sensitive to the sun.

LATIF: You know, they eat sunshine.

VALERIE TROUET: And they get to be very old, so maybe I can learn something about the sun from the rings in trees.

LATIF: Like trees are the original astronomers, recording their solar observations.

VALERIE TROUET: Yeah, exactly.

LULU: Huh. But what could you actually learn about the sun from the rings? Isn't it just like each year the tree grows it gets a ring and you learn how old it is by counting them? Like, is there a thing beyond the counting the rings? [laughs]

VALERIE TROUET: Yes. So it's a very good question.

LATIF: So Valerie explained yes, it's true most trees grow a new ring every year ...

VALERIE TROUET: But what fewer people know is that not every ring is equally wide, not every ring is equally dense, not every ring has the same chemistry.

LATIF: And it's in those differences, Valerie says, where you can learn all kinds of stuff about the tree—and even stuff not about the tree.

VALERIE TROUET: [laughs] Exactly.

LULU: So like what? Like what?

VALERIE TROUET: Well ...

LATIF: You could learn about the weather.

VALERIE TROUET: How hot or how cold it is.

LATIF: You can see how much it rains ...

VALERIE TROUET: Storms.

LATIF: ... or didn't.

VALERIE TROUET: Droughts.

LATIF: You could see trauma ...

VALERIE TROUET: Yes.

LATIF: You know, which could create a very skinny ring. You could see fires, which leave scars. Or bugs, which leave these red or blue stains.

VALERIE TROUET: Human history as well.

LATIF: All kinds of stuff.

LULU: Okay. Continue.

LATIF: So back to Tucson, Valerie's at this bar to meet up with two other scientists because they're all in town for this big conference.

VALERIE TROUET: An international tree ring conference!

LATIF: For all of the dendrochronologists in the Americas.

LULU: Is it like four people?

VALERIE TROUET: No! [laughs]

LULU: Okay, how many people is it?

VALERIE TROUET: Oh, in total?

LULU: Yeah.

VALERIE TROUET: I don't know. Maybe 200-250 people.

LATIF: A lot!

LATIF: And among them were Valerie's bar buddies, Marta ...

MARTA DOMÍNGUEZ-DELMÁS: Marta Domínguez-Delmás.

LATIF: Spanish scientist.

MARTA DOMÍNGUEZ-DELMÁS: Specialized in dendroarchaeology.

LATIF: Studies the wood in shipwrecks.

LULU: What?

LATIF: Yeah. Like, she dives down and examines the rings in the wood of the hulls of the ships that wrecked hundreds of years ago.

LULU: Oh!

MARTA DOMÍNGUEZ-DELMÁS: Yeah, the treasure is the wood.

LATIF: Third one ...

GRANT HARLEY: So my name is Grant Harley.

LATIF: ... Grant.

GRANT HARLEY: Originally from Florida.

LATIF: He's a paleoclimatologist.

GRANT HARLEY: Associate professor of geography at the University of Idaho.

LATIF: He uses tree rings to study past and future climate. So it's one of the nights of this conference ...

VALERIE TROUET: I think it was the last evening of the conference.

LULU: That they hit the bar?

LATIF: That they hit the bar. So they're sitting there, drinking some beers ...

GRANT HARLEY: Yeah, like, we're sitting around this table, and we start talking about this research project that I had going on, and ...

LATIF: And Grant says something like, "I've got a puzzle and I'm not quite sure how to solve it. And I'm wondering if you two can help me out."

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: So he says, "For the past few years, I've been doing this research down in Florida, like ..."

GRANT HARLEY: All the way, like, almost to Key West, right near the southernmost point of the US.

LATIF: On this island called ...

GRANT HARLEY: Big Pine Key.

LATIF: Big Pine Key. Studying ...

GRANT HARLEY: These really gnarly pine trees that are basically like big bonsai trees.

LATIF: And he tells Valerie and Marta one day he's out there, you know, just doing his normal research, which is, like, taking these pencil-shaped core samples from these trees, and he notices something he hadn't seen before.

VALERIE TROUET: And he said he saw these tree rings.

GRANT HARLEY: These, like, really, really narrow rings.

LATIF: So narrow he could barely see them.

GRANT HARLEY: Super, super narrow. Really, really small. That automatically tells you that wow ...

LATIF: Something bad happened here.

GRANT HARLEY: That tree was really stressed.

LATIF: So he's going through the list of things that he knows can stress out a tree.

GRANT HARLEY: Drought.

LATIF: Maybe it didn't rain that much.

GRANT HARLEY: Insects can have a different ...

LATIF: Maybe the trees got attacked by beetles or it was unusually cold.

GRANT HARLEY: I keep on going back to the drawing board to find out what is the signal in these tree rings.

LATIF: Until he comes up with a theory.

GRANT HARLEY: Hurricanes.

LATIF: Hurricanes?

LULU: But wouldn't—wouldn't a hurricane make a fat ring because it's bringing so much rain?

LATIF: Well ...

VALERIE TROUET: I mean, a hurricane, that's as you know, pretty powerful.

LATIF: Yeah.

LATIF: According to Valerie, a hurricane just shreds a tree.

VALERIE TROUET: It doesn't just lose its needles. It can also lose its big branches, obviously.

LULU: Mmm. But how would you prove that?

LATIF: Turns out ...

GRANT HARLEY: NOAA ...

LATIF: ... NOAA, as in the government weather people ...

GRANT HARLEY: Has this data set.

LATIF: It's just a big list of all the hurricanes that have happened in the Atlantic since 1851 that the government made by combing through old newspapers.

GRANT HARLEY: And we compared that list ...

VALERIE TROUET: ... to those years that he saw with very narrow rings ...

LATIF: And they matched.

GRANT HARLEY: Bingo!

LATIF: In other words ...

VALERIE TROUET: He was right. They were caused by hurricanes.

LULU: Hmm!

LATIF: And Valerie says this match was exciting on a couple different levels. For one thing ...

VALERIE TROUET: I don't think I'd heard about using tree rings to reconstruct hurricanes.

LATIF: It just felt like a new way to use tree rings to understand the world, but also it gave us new hurricane data, which we don't have a lot of.

VALERIE TROUET: Because there are so few of them, so it's hard to calculate how frequently they happen because you have so few ...

LATIF: Data points, kinda.

VALERIE TROUET: Data points. Exactly.

LATIF: And what Grant realizes is he must be sitting on a lot more hurricane data points because his trees, the trees with the skinny rings that seemed to represent hurricanes, they go back way further than the government data.

GRANT HARLEY: Correct. They go back another 150 years-ish to 1707.

LATIF: So Grant's thinking he might be able to use his tree rings to almost double the amount of historical hurricane data we have for this part of the world. Problem is is he now needs something outside of the tree rings to prove that. And this is essentially the puzzle that he brings to Valerie and Marta at the bar.

VALERIE TROUET: How do I prove this, that this is hurricanes?

LATIF: And Marta ...

VALERIE TROUET: Marta Domínguez-Delmás.

LATIF: ... is like, "It's funny you say that because a lot of the shipwrecks I dive at wrecked because of hurricanes."

MARTA DOMÍNGUEZ-DELMÁS: Entire fleets going down because of hurricanes.

VALERIE TROUET: And so I just spit it out. I'm like, "What if we—what if we linked the two?"

LATIF: Like, what if you put the tree ring data, where you have skinny rings that you think are hurricanes, next to a big list of all the shipwrecks that happened for the last few hundred years? Would they match up?

LULU: Because if they do, we're seeing what?

LATIF: Because if they do, it's like the shipwrecks and the tree rings are both showing us hurricanes.

LULU: It's like double-referenced. Huh, got it.

LATIF: Okay, so they have this idea at the bar that night. Literally the next morning, they get together and start looking around for a list of all the shipwrecks that have happened in that part of the world. And fortunately ...

VALERIE TROUET: There's a very good record, written documentary record of the Spanish shipping trade from 1492 up until, it ends around 1825. And when they would wreck, they would keep track of where they wrecked, when they wrecked, why they wrecked, whether it's pirates or—or hurricanes.

LATIF: They get their hands on this list, they eliminate the shipwrecks they know were caused by something other than hurricanes or that are in the wrong area or that, you know, were not in the right time of year, and then Grant takes that shipwreck spreadsheet and merges it with the tree ring spreadsheet, and ...

VALERIE TROUET: I kid you not, they're almost identical.

LATIF: They match!

VALERIE TROUET: You see the exact same pattern when you compare the shipwreck years to hurricane years with the tree rings.

LATIF: So it's like, okay, fat ring, no shipwrecks. Fat ring, no shipwrecks. Fat ring, no shipwrecks. Narrow ring, tons of shipwrecks.

VALERIE TROUET: And that? Yeah, that was the moment where I'm like, "Yeah, this is it. This is working."

LULU: Wow! There's something so satisfying about possibly catching an objective—possibly—an objective truth, an objective happening with these silent bystanders. It's just, like, a tree.

VALERIE TROUET: Yes.

LULU: It just feels harder to come by these days.

VALERIE TROUET: Yeah, you're spot on. That's what I really like about trees. You can't say the tree's saying this or the tree's saying that because you can see it right there in the wood. You can't—you can't make it up. It's right there. Trees don't lie.

LULU: Okay, and just so I am clear on what they are not lying about, I think what we've just learned is that the shipwreck data confirmed that Grant's skinny tree rings are, in fact, hurricanes, which means tree rings are now doubling the amount of hurricane data that we have?

VALERIE TROUET: Tripling.

LATIF: So okay, so the hurricane data the government had at the beginning of all this went back to 1850, right? Then the tree rings extended it back to 1700, so they added, like, 150 years. But now the shipwrecks extend it back even further, all the way to 1495.

VALERIE TROUET: Yeah, 150 to 450 years. Yeah.

LULU: Oh my God!

LATIF: So these three tree ring scientists basically tripled all of the historical hurricane data that we had for the Caribbean just by, like, lining up these three different data sets.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: So after they gathered this data, they sent it off to the people who make the hurricane models that, you know, predict how hurricanes are gonna develop in the future. So now those models can make better predictions, which could in turn, you know, save tons of money and lives.

LULU: That is so cool!

VALERIE TROUET: Very cool.

LATIF: Actually, this is—we're still just at the beginning of this story.

LATIF: So our tree ring scientists, they sent off this data to the hurricane modelers, but they also kept it for themselves because they're scientists ...

GRANT HARLEY: Trying to wring that sponge dry and get as much science out of that as possible.

LATIF: And they want to see what else can we notice here? Cut to a few months later ...

VALERIE TROUET: I was staying in this really cheap motel in Flagstaff in northern Arizona.

LATIF: Valerie was actually on a research trip for a different tree ring project.

VALERIE TROUET: But I was feeling really under the weather. And so while I was staying in and getting bored out of my head because I couldn't go do field work, I went to a coffee shop.*

LATIF: She's at the coffee shop.

VALERIE TROUET: I ordered a coffee. I sat myself at the window.

LATIF: And she's like, "I'm just gonna work here."

VALERIE TROUET: Pulled up the graph.

LATIF: The graph of the 300 years of shipwrecks, which also kind of stand in for the hurricanes, but anyways she'd been toying around with it, she hadn't really found anything interesting in it yet. But then ...

VALERIE TROUET: I went to grab my coffee, and when I went back ...

LATIF: ... from the counter ...

VALERIE TROUET: ... towards my laptop ...

LATIF: ... she noticed something in the graph that she hadn't seen when she was looking at it up close.

VALERIE TROUET: This dip ...

LATIF: From 1645 to about 1715 where there were virtually no wrecks.

LULU: No wrecks. That feels not hurricane-y.

LATIF: Yeah. So, like, kind of like a grace period or something. Like, it was like 70 years of almost no hurricanes.

VALERIE TROUET: And once you see it you can't unsee it.

LULU: All the weathermen between 1645 and 1715 were like, "Back to you, Don."

VALERIE TROUET: Yeah. [laughs]

LATIF: So she's like, "That's weird!"

VALERIE TROUET: What is—what is that period?

LATIF: And the answer to that question, it does two things: it reveals this secret about the sun that you almost certainly did not learn in school.

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: And it also shows how this moment, this 70-year stretch, this clear-skied time of very few hurricanes, sort of shaped the world we live in today.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: And we'll get to that after the break.

LULU: Lulu.

LATIF: Latif.

LULU: Radiolab.

LATIF: Uh, Lulu, why don't you just tell me what you have gotten?

LULU: Where we are?

LATIF: Yeah, where we are.

LULU: [laughs] Okay, okay, okay, okay. So we started the story—this is a story about a drunk idea with follow-through.

LATIF: That's right!

LULU: They woke up the next morning and actually went and [laughs] —and chased it out.

LATIF: Nice!

LULU: So these scientists have chased down this wild idea, they've matched tree ring data with shipwreck data. It's allowed them to look deeper in the past than ever before at hurricanes. They discovered this weird lull.

LATIF: Right.

LULU: This time where there were less hurricanes. And then you were about to tell us how that lull shaped the modern world we live in today.

LATIF: Right. So Valerie sees this lull and she's like, "That's weird, but also familiar."

VALERIE TROUET: The dates were 1645 to 1725. And I'm like, "I know those dates somewhere from. What is—what is that period?" It came to me pretty quickly, this period, this exact period is the Maunder Minimum.

LATIF: The Maunder Minimum. Also called the Maunder Minimum.

LULU: Okay. What the heck is a Maunder Minimum?

VALERIE TROUET: It's a very well-known period of low solar activity. A period when the sun was weak.

LATIF: Apparently the sun, the kind of solar radiation that comes from the sun, it's not constant.

LULU: What? So there are periods where the sun is like, "Mmm, my burner's on high. Mmm, my burner's on low?"

LATIF: Yeah. Yeah. When the sun is at its peak, it's called maximum, at its lowest point, minimum.

LULU: Huh.

LULU: So does that mean that during the Maunder Minimum it was actually colder?

VALERIE TROUET: It was colder then, yeah.

LATIF: Huh. And would it be darker? Or it would be just as bright?

VALERIE TROUET: Just as bright.

LATIF: Just as bright, but just cooler.

VALERIE TROUET: Yup, exactly.

VALERIE TROUET: I don't know if you've heard of the little ice age?

LULU: I haven't!

LATIF: Started at the beginning of the 14th century and lasted roughly 500 years.

VALERIE TROUET: And it's kind of the opposite of what we're experiencing now, right? Rather than glaciers retreating, you have glaciers advancing.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: According to Valerie, the coldest period of that little ice age was the Maunder Minimum.

VALERIE TROUET: The fact that the sun didn't have as much energy contributed to it being colder.

LATIF: And the colder temperatures of that period might have meant cooler oceans, which in theory could mean less hurricanes.

GRANT HARLEY: Because the fuel that drives hurricanes is really warm sea surface temperatures. If you don't have that, you really don't have a hurricane.

LULU: Huh. So then that could explain why there were fewer shipwrecks during that time?

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: Hmm. That makes me feel weird.

LATIF: Why?

LULU: I just feel like for the deniers, for the human-caused climate change deniers, the phrase they bandied about all the time was, like, "No, there's natural cycles. It warms up then it cools down."

LATIF: Yeah. Natural cycles. Can't predict the weather!

VALERIE TROUET: Oh, they do say that. Yep.

LULU: So then is this showing that the sun does play some kind of role in climate change?

VALERIE TROUET: No. Not at all.

LATIF: This actually shows the opposite.

[NEWS CLIP: Check this out.]

[NEWS CLIP: Record-breaking temperatures.]

[NEWS CLIP: Record-breaking heat wave.]

[NEWS CLIP: Dangerous heat waves.]

LATIF: As we all know, in the last few years, we have had the hottest years in the history of our planet.

[NEWS CLIP: A summer heat wave.]

[NEWS CLIP: Unprecedented heat wave.]

[NEWS CLIP: It's really hot!]

[NEWS CLIP: It's gonna be a brutal couple days.]

LATIF: It's like we're setting records all over the place, right?

LULU: Yeah.

[NEWS CLIP: Weather stations are logging a sea of red as temperatures hit record highs.]

LATIF: All of this has happened at a time when we're not even at a maximum yet.

LULU: We're in a—we're in a weak, even though it's—it's so hot?

VALERIE TROUET: Yeah, exactly.

LULU: Oh!

LATIF: Right now, we're in the middle of a smaller 11-year solar cycle. We hit the minimum in 2019. We're still ramping up.

VALERIE TROUET: A lot more heat is coming our way.

LULU: Oh no!

LATIF: Yeah. Okay, so back to the story.

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: So Valerie was in the coffee shop. She saw the lull in the shipwreck data, and she recognized it as the Maunder Minimum. But when Grant looked at that same time period ...

GRANT HARLEY: Period of the—the coldest period of the little ice age, 1645 to 1715 ...

LATIF: ... he recognized something else.

GRANT HARLEY: The golden age of piracy.

LULU: The golden age of piracy?

LATIF: That's right. The golden age of piracy. Grant is a big fan of pirates, has been ever since he was a kid. Turns out this is common knowledge among pirate nerds, but in almost these exact same years, there was an explosion in bands of pirates basically robbing and hijacking ships in the Caribbean specifically and in the Atlantic more broadly.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: Like, it was when piracy became first of all more common, but also, like, became way more culturally visible. Many of the most famous pirates you know of came out of this very period.

LULU: Arrr you going to tell me who?

LATIF: Henry Morgan, aka ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Captain Morgan.]

LATIF: ... Captain Morgan.

LULU: He's real?

LATIF: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We have captured a Spanish galleon.]

LATIF: Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: If I had a pistol I'd shoot out your gizzard pin.]

LATIF: Blackbeard.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I be Blackbeard.]

LULU: Huh!

LATIF: And even if you've never heard of any of those people, you've definitely heard of ...

MATTHEW CASEY: Pirates of the Caribbean.

LULU: [laughs] Oh my gosh! Really?

MATTHEW CASEY: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You are, without doubt, the worst pirate I've ever heard of.]

MATTHEW CASEY: This is the age where the mythology of Pirates of the Caribbean emerged.

LATIF: This, by the way, is Matt Casey.

MATTHEW CASEY: I am a specialist in the 20th century history of Haiti and Cuba at the University of Southern Mississippi.

LATIF: He and Grant actually met on a bus on a field trip ...

MATTHEW CASEY: Two-hour bus ride.

LATIF: ... to New Orleans.

MATTHEW CASEY: And I'm not even sure that we talked the whole two hours, but very quickly within the conversation we realized that we had a lot in common.

LATIF: Among the things, their love for the golden age of piracy. And at some point Grant asked him, "Do you think that this lull in hurricanes that we found in our data could have caused the golden age of piracy?"

MATTHEW CASEY: And I—I became really excited because yes, for a historian of the Caribbean this just makes so much sense.

LATIF: Huh!

LATIF: Matt says of course there's no one cause for anything in history. There are a million explanations for the golden age of piracy. There are social reasons, political reasons, economic, cultural, all these different reasons why pirates were in ascendancy at this time, but the fact is ...

MATTHEW CASEY: Pirates spend a lot of time on the water, and so as fun as it is to see them as these kind of masters of the sea who just take a licking and can do whatever they want, they're absolutely vulnerable to the elements.

LATIF: Like hurricanes. So less hurricanes could mean a better environment for pirating.

MATTHEW CASEY: Yes.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: But ...

MATTHEW CASEY: That was not my first thought.

LATIF: Matt Casey says when he looks at this period of time, this lull in hurricanes that lines up with the Maunder Minimum, that lines up with the golden age of piracy, he sees it lining up with a whole other thing.

MATTHEW CASEY: This is the moment that shaped the history of the world in a way that people don't always recognize.

LULU: The world?

MATTHEW CASEY: It sounds like an exaggeration, but I—that is not too hyperbolic.

LATIF: And this moment, Matt says is ...

MATTHEW CASEY: The sugar revolution.

LATIF: ... the sugar revolution.

MATTHEW CASEY: One of the first places where sugar production occurred on a large scale is in the Caribbean.

LATIF: Hmm.

MATTHEW CASEY: Probably 1620s or 1630s.

LATIF: It was this massively pivotal moment in world history, Matt says, where European plantation owners brought thousands of people against their will ...

MATTHEW CASEY: Enslaved Africans, indentured Europeans ...

LATIF: ... onto these islands in the Caribbean ...

MATTHEW CASEY: ... to produce sugar ...

LATIF: ... on an enormous scale.

MATTHEW CASEY: People refer to a sugar plantation as a factory in a field.

LATIF: Between 1650 and 1725, hundreds of thousands—by some accounts nearly a million people were kidnapped to work in the Caribbean. Many died.

MATTHEW CASEY: Horrendous in the scale of human tragedy.

LATIF: And in roughly that same time period, sugar consumption in Europe quadrupled.

MATTHEW CASEY: That sugar produces massive amounts of wealth, so much so that European industrialization was actually paid for by how lucrative sugar was in the Caribbean.

LATIF: A lot of historians, including Matt, argue that the profits from the sugar plantations were ...

MATTHEW CASEY: The start-up capital of industrial capitalism in England.

LATIF: And that these profits not only funded the Industrial Revolution, but essentially gave birth to modern capitalism itself. And the way Matt sees it, part of what allowed for all of that to happen, the boom in sugar production, the expansion in slavery, the birth of capitalism, is this decades-long Maunder Minimum lull in hurricanes. It was a moment of calm weather that let the plantations flourish, the ships sail, filled with pirates but also with, like, people and sugar and money. This period of stability, it subtly enabled all of that to happen.

LULU: Okay, where—okay, okay. What does this all have to do with trees?

LATIF: Right. So trees is kind of the way they noticed this, like, subtle Rube Goldberg machine that has been playing out over centuries, right?

LULU: Okay. Meaning what? Yeah, what are the—what the bells and whistles?

LATIF: Right. Okay, well so—okay, so basically these three scientists in this bar, they used a combo of information they got from tree rings and information about shipwrecks to discover this 70-year period where the sun was dimmer, which somehow led to fewer hurricanes. And that 70-year period had this sort of disproportionate effect on agriculture, on basically slavery, on capitalism, on the way our modern world gets made. Maybe [laughs] This is all a big theory.

LULU: [laughs]

LATIF: And I think the thing that makes this story worth telling right now is, like, all of that, the Maunder Minimum, their estimate is that that was about one degree Celsius of cooling. And now we are—we are doing—we are doing this to ourselves but, like, in the reverse. We are now the sun.

LULU: Huh.

LATIF: Whereas the sun cooled the planet down by one degree, we are now turning up our own thermostat by two degrees. Maybe. Can we keep it two degrees? Like—like, to me it's like, we're changing our climate, and what new possibilities—and even kind of what new cruelties—like, are we gonna unleash, are we gonna open up? I don't know. I don't know if you can say for sure. It's unimaginable.

LULU: This story is just ramping my fear. Like, does that give you anything other than just, like, make you want to lie down and—and ...

LATIF: No, I think it does. Like, I think it's like—I think it's like—we're like meerkats, you know?

LULU: How so?

LATIF: We're, like, running around, foraging for little grubs.

LULU: Yeah.

LATIF: And then every once in a while, like, one of us stands up and looks around. Like, that's to me what they did in the bar. Like, it's like one of those moments of, like, standing up, looking around, being like, "Whoa! There's a big picture here!"

LULU: Mm-hmm.

LATIF: It takes those kinds of, like, bar, bus, whatever, wherever moments to, like, kind of sit back and be like, "Wait a second, all of this stuff is connected!" Like, all this stuff is, like, we're trying to, like, divide up the world to make it comprehensible, but it's actually it's all woven together.

LULU: This episode was reported by Latif Nasser, with help from Ekedi Fausther-Keeys and Maria Paz Gutiérrez. Produced by Maria Paz Gutiérrez and Pat Walters, with help from Ekedi Fausther-Keeys and Sachi Kitajima Mulkey.

LATIF: Mixed by Jeremy Bloom with mixing help from Arianne Wack. Fact-checking by Natalie Middleton, and edited by Pat Walters.

LULU: Big thanks this episode to Scott St. George, Nathaniel Millet, Michael Charles Sandbach and Justin Maxwell.

LATIF: That's all from us. Thank you so much for listening.

LULU: Go thank a tree.

LATIF: Go thank a tree.

LULU: For its service to history.

LATIF: Well, and for its shade that helps keep you cool by maybe one degree Celsius, who knows?

LULU: Yeah. All right, see you soon.

LATIF: Okay, bye bye.

[LISTENER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Anna Rascouët-Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Sachi Kitajima Mulkey. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Jeremiah Barba and I'm calling from San Francisco, California. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

 

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