Oct 18, 2023
Transcript
[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: Arrrr 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: Stay tuned. More to come following the break.
LULU: Okay, Latif. Hello.
LATIF: Hello!
LULU: Welcome.
LATIF: Thanks.
LULU: To Radiolab.
LATIF: Where am I? [laughs]
LULU: While you were on vacation, I got into some reporting hijinks.
LATIF: Okay.
LULU: Okay, well, where did you go on vacation?
LATIF: I went to Iceland.
LULU: Okay, so as you were, like, flying down over the island, your family's all beside you, I'm guessing, covered in snacks. Underneath you, in the ocean ...
LATIF: Mm-hmm?
LULU: ... there was a pretty stunning and kind of terrifying thing happening.
LATIF: Okay.
LULU: And you were gone and I was curious, so I decided to plunge in, so to speak.
LATIF: Okay!
LULU: There he is, with all his books! You look like such a mad librarian.
HANK GREEN: Yeah.
SOREN WHEELER: Anyway, hey Hank.
LULU: I also brought Soren, our editor, with me, and together we called up the guy who I first heard about all this from.
HANK GREEN: I'm Hank Green. I make internet content. [laughs]
LULU: Like?
HANK GREEN: I make a lot of science TikToks and tweets and YouTube videos.
LULU: Are you familiar with this gentleman?
LATIF: Yeah, of course!
SOREN: I feel like he's one of the smarter people out there doing science stuff online. Like, he's the host of the YouTube channel SciShow.
LATIF: Yeah.
SOREN: But he's also written novels and founded several media companies.
HANK GREEN: Yeah.
SOREN: Busy guy.
LULU: Well, we are so—thank you. We know you didn't really want to do this. [laughs]
HANK GREEN: [laughs] I just wanted to be very clear where I was coming from.
LULU: This story is gonna get a little tricky, but it all started for Hank in the middle of summer 2023.
LATIF: Okay.
LULU: Which was a pretty depressing one on the climate change front—the hottest June on record followed by the hottest July on record. And for Hank in particular ...
HANK GREEN: Mentally, I was in a weird spot. I mean, I was in the midst of being treated for cancer. And during chemo—and I'm through it now, during chemo, I had about a week of being completely useless when I would only consume content, and then, like, maybe four or five days when I felt good enough to, like, make stuff.
SOREN: And Hank says he would spend a lot of his downtime, sort of just reading, researching, looking online.
HANK GREEN: And I had been confronted by a lot of really sort of apocalyptic ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: We are reaching the end.]
HANK GREEN: ... doomsday prepper kind of people on TikTok.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Having a panic attack for the last hour.]
HANK GREEN: Who were looking at the temperature of the North Atlantic Ocean.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Unprecedented warming.]
HANK GREEN: And it was hotter than it had ever been.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Ever been in recorded history. And things are only getting worse.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's not good.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... the holocene extinction, the sixth extinction event, is probably starting now. I'm gonna explain this with a visual aid.]
LULU: And all of these TikTokers are pointing to this one chart.
SOREN: And here, I can show it to you right here.
LATIF: Oh, you just shared it to me? Okay.
SOREN: Yeah.
LATIF: Okay.
SOREN: So it's basically a graph of the sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic over the last couple decades.
LATIF: It's kind of a pretty graph, yeah.
SOREN: Yeah, it's a bunch of squiggly blue lines going up and down, and that's sort of the seasonal change. And then you can see the average is going up over time. But then ...
HANK GREEN: There's a red line, which is this year.
LULU: Mm-hmm.
HANK GREEN: And that line is creeping up, up, up. And then it has a spike.
SOREN: Sudden red, uh-oh!
HANK GREEN: Yeah, yeah.
LULU: And that line is, like, way above the average, even the seasonal ups and downs.
LATIF: It's not even close. Like, the high jumper has cleared the pole.
LULU: Yeah.
HANK GREEN: Yeah.
SOREN: And this spike is happening over the course of months or weeks, or ...?
HANK GREEN: I think it's days.
SOREN: Days? Oh!
[ARCHIVE CLIP: An existential threat to everything we know.]
SOREN: So all the TikTokers are basically like ...
HANK GREEN: This is it. It's happening now.
SOREN: This is us falling over the cliff.
HANK GREEN: We're falling over the cliff.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Figure out your relationship with Jesus Christ.]
LULU: And are you watching this stuff literally, like, while you're getting chemo, or ...?
HANK GREEN: Yeah, I probably didn't see it, like, during the moment when the chemo was going into my body, but certainly during the ...
SOREN: That does tend to be when people doom scroll.
LULU: I'm just picturing you—yeah.
HANK GREEN: [laughs] Yeah, but anyway, so I'd seen this, and ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Are we all about to die?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: You may have seen this graph. If you haven't, I'm sorry ...]
LULU: And Hank decides to hop on TikTok himself.
HANK GREEN: Like, I made a little series that was, like, trying to, like, contextualize it.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hank Green: We're not there yet. We're not anywhere close to there.]
HANK GREEN: At the time I was seeing it and I was like, I don't—like, it's probably just some kind of natural variation where it's like, cooler than average right now in some parts of the world, and it's hotter than average in other parts. And also, we're entering an El Niño. So an El Niño is just like a warmer climate time generally.
SOREN: And you take one little spot on the globe and blips happen.
HANK GREEN: You know, there's natural variation across the Earth.
LATIF: I don't know. That—that doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried. Like, now is not the time to say, "Hey, it's getting a lot warmer, but no big deal."
LULU: Totally. And to be clear, Hank takes this stuff very seriously.
HANK GREEN: As a person who's been worried about climate change for—my dad was the state director of The Nature Conservancy in Florida when I was growing up. So, like, we're a family of environmentalists. My mom's a sociologist who worked on sustainability. Like, and I'm—like, I have a degree in environmental studies. Like, I've been in this for a long time, and it's very scary. This is, like—like, this is the biggest problem humanity has ever faced but, you know, there's sort of a debate that's like, do we need to get people more scared about climate change, or do we need to get people more hopeful about climate change? Because they can go around a bend eventually, where it's like, there's nothing to be done and I will just be hopeless and sad. And I think a lot of people are there.
LULU: Right. If you're too scared, you, like, tip into nihilism, kind of?
HANK GREEN: Yeah. And this is like, it's gonna be like a bell curve of worry that we're all on somewhere, and in order to get, like, everybody to the appropriate amount of worry, we're always pushing some people to way too worried. And, like, there's like, not really too worried about climate change until and unless you give up on trying to solve the problem.
LULU: Mm-hmm.
HANK GREEN: So, like ...
LULU: So according to Hank, when it came to this temperature spike in the North Atlantic, his sense was that these people online were being way too alarmist.
HANK GREEN: There was a sort of a mathematics of gambling guy.
LULU: [laughs]
HANK GREEN: Which really isn't a climate scientist, as you might expect. Who was getting a lot of traction by tweeting about how this was a really big deal, and then he was, like, getting on the news ...
LULU: Huh!
SOREN: And so Hank thought maybe this is a moment to dampen rather than, you know, fan the flames, but also keep the conversation focused on things that we might be able to do.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hank Green: Over the next week or two on my TikTok, I'm gonna make some videos about the things that we are actually doing right now and will be doing in the future to help take care of this.]
LULU: So that is how Hank is spending this hot, hot summer: going through chemo, holding a candle for hope, battling climate nihilism. And then ...
HANK GREEN: I was scrolling science news in bed late at night, like, before going to sleep, like I do.
LULU: [laughs] Yeah.
LULU: ... he comes across a link to an article that made him sit straight up in bed.
HANK GREEN: Yeah. It's like 11:00 at night. I have to get up at 7:30 in the morning, and I'm like, "Oh, I'm gonna read a lot right now." [laughs]
LULU: [laughs]
LULU: Okay, so the thing he sees, it's this article in Science, it's a write-up of three recent studies, and what they found is that the spike in the North Atlantic sea temperatures, this, like, troublingly warming water ...
LATIF: This year's spike.
SOREN: That one we were talking about, right.
LULU: This year's recent spike ...
LATIF: Yeah.
LULU: ... may have been caused by this thing, which is that a few years ago, the UN put into place some regulations that forced cargo ships to start burning cleaner fuel to, you know, reduce the pollution that they make. And that, doing that good thing, these papers said, that caused the water to get warmer.
HANK GREEN: Yeah.
LATIF: Wait, so they're saying that getting rid of pollution, that you would think would make the problem better, is actually, in this one spot for a while at least, making the problem worse?
SOREN: Right.
LATIF: How?
LULU: All right, so let's go back to before this regulation, this change had happened. All these big, hulky cargo ships are criss-crossing the North Atlantic, chugging along with their big smokestacks, puffing out big plumes of smoggy smoke.
HANK GREEN: Cargo ships burn, like, the dirtiest oil. It's like the oil that's left at the bottom.
LULU: Like that mayonnaise-y black, black mayonnaise-y like ...
HANK GREEN: You have to, like, heat it up before it'll even flow kinda oil.
LULU: And so there's all this carbon dioxide going out into the air, of course, but there is also all this sulfur dioxide going out into the air.
LATIF: Okay.
LULU: And that's horrible.
HANK GREEN: Sulfur dioxide is bad for people. It's like it's bad to breathe, and then it is also bad for the environment because it turns into sulfuric acid when it mixes with water, and then it falls down to the Earth as acid rain. So that's where acid rain comes from.
LATIF: Hmm, right.
SOREN: Which is why the UN wanted to regulate it.
LULU: But it turns out that in addition to being horrible for human health and making acid rain, sulfur dioxide also does something else.
HANK GREEN: It actually can seed clouds. As the ship goes by and it pumps the sulfur dioxide up, you can see, just like kind of a contrail that a jet would leave behind, you can see—they're called ship tracks.
SOREN: Hank actually showed us a picture of this that was taken from space.
LULU: These tracks are like, so big. It just looks like giant zebra stripes over the ocean of just white.
HANK GREEN: When there's the right amount of heat and water in the air, you get all of these extra clouds that you normally wouldn't get.
LULU: Okay.
HANK GREEN: And the clouds reflect the energy of the sun into space. So instead of hitting the water and heating up the surface of the ocean, it hits a cloud. You know, you could think of it just like a very thin umbrella. And then there's a shadow on the ocean.
SOREN: Which keeps the water at least a little bit cooler.
LULU: So suddenly you take that away, you burn cleaner fuel, and then it's like taking away the beach umbrella. You're suddenly just—you're the ocean.
LATIF: Ohh!
LULU: And the ocean is getting blasted by the sun.
LATIF: Got it.
HANK GREEN: It's not unanticipated. This is actually something that climate scientists have known about for decades. But it is non-intuitive. And what this means is that overall, we have not seen the actual full effects of the carbon dioxide.
SOREN: It's like the—the warming from carbon dioxide has been worse than you thought up to now. It's just been sort of hidden by all the dirty clouds that we've had blocking light.
LATIF: Right.
SOREN: And if you get rid of that, you're gonna realize just how bad this really is.
LATIF: Right.
HANK GREEN: Yeah, and ...
LULU: That feels like, oh, things are—this is doom-y, like, I don't ...
LULU: This now seems like a doom on a doom to me, right?
LATIF: Yeah, I agree. I feel like it's a double-decker doom. Yeah.
LULU: ... just gonna burn. Like, I go more to nihilism.
HANK GREEN: I mean, I—I was—I found this very exciting and, like, fascinating.
LULU: But not to Hank Green. He reads this study and sees a silver lining, a literal silver lining in the smog cloud.
SOREN: A smog cloud that isn't there anymore.
LULU: Right.
HANK GREEN: The thing that excited me the most about it is we did it, and then we undid it in order to make life better for people who are now not breathing that sulfur dioxide into their lungs, but now we have a chance to study what that looks like.
LULU: He sees these papers, and he's like, we have just done a pretty monumental experiment.
LATIF: Yeah?
LULU: Because for decades we had been letting these ships put out these pollute-y, smoggy smoke trails, which just so happened to act like umbrellas and shade the ocean, and now that we've taken the umbrella away, we can measure how big or small that cooling effect was.
HANK GREEN: But then the broader—the broader question is can you then—if we were doing it before, and we know what the effect was, can you then find another, better way to do it intentionally without putting the acid rain stuff, smoggy stuff in the air?
LATIF: Huh. So, like—like, can we find a cleaner way to do the cloud umbrella, just on purpose this time?
HANK GREEN: Yeah.
LULU: So he reads a ton more, he gets really excited, he goes to bed and dreams of, like, data and hope and ships, and then he wakes up the next day, and fires out this, like, big Twitter thread kind of explaining what he sees.
HANK GREEN: And, oh boy. [laughs]
SOREN: You put out a thread, and then somebody writes back, "No no no no no, God no, God no, no no no Hank, no. No, Hank. Hank, stop. No, Hank. Bad Hank." Do you remember the first one you read and how it felt?
HANK GREEN: It might've been that one. Yeah.
SOREN: [laughs] That was, by the way, a quoted tweet. No, there was only like three "nos." I think it was "No no no," I think was the tweet.
HANK GREEN: I mean, certainly it triggered, like, please explain to me what I have stepped in here.
LULU: So what Hank had stepped in was a heated and sometimes vicious debate ...
[NEWS CLIP: Which effectively says that this whole line of research is unethical and a bad idea.]
LULU: ... among climate activists ...
[NEWS CLIP: It's a sign of desperation.]
LULU: ... and climate scientists ...
[NEWS CLIP: The cat's out of the bag. People know these—these options exist.]
LULU: ... about a little thing called geoengineering.
[NEWS CLIP: This would not be the first choice.]
[NEWS CLIP: No, or a third or fourth choice.]
LULU: So Geoengineering 101. What is it, first of all?
HANK GREEN: So yeah, geoengineering is just any way that you would change the planet intentionally. But in general, when it comes to climate change, we're talking about decreasing the amount of heat in the system of the planet.
SOREN: Like, just do whatever you can to cool things down.
HANK GREEN: Right. And the simplest way you could imagine is, like, putting a giant mirror in space, and reflecting some of the sun's light back and then there's like a shadow on the planet in that area. Like, that's not really what is being proposed, but ...
LULU: Okay, I will say that until very recently, I thought this work of geoengineering was kind of like futile hubris. Like, you read these stories of people in the 19th century shooting cannons into clouds to try to get rain to reduce drought or, like, I read about, like, the Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov trying to spray a mist of cement on clouds to prevent snowfall.
HANK GREEN: Yeah.
LATIF: "A mist of cement" is never a phrase I thought I would ever hear.
LULU: So, like, to me I thought geoengineering was, like, not actually that realistic. But what I've learned in talking to Hank and digging into all this stuff is that no, the technology is there now, and there are some serious proposals from serious people being entertained seriously, including a proposal ...
HANK GREEN: To put sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere.
LATIF: Hmm.
SOREN: Now to be clear, I mean, like, Hank points out that this is very different than the ship clouds he got excited about because those are lower down, they're local and they disappear on the scale of days, whereas sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere ...
HANK GREEN: Would float around the whole planet, and be a very thin umbrella wherever it ends up, and also in the stratosphere would stay there for a long time.
LULU: How long?
HANK GREEN: Like, years.
SOREN: And there's a lot about this that we just don't know.
HANK GREEN: Like, we don't know exactly what's gonna get coolest, what's gonna get warmer. We don't know how diseases are gonna move around in that world.
LULU: So there are a lot of people who understandably when geoengineering comes up, are like, "No, no, no, no, no," because they're thinking about these unintended consequences, you know? And there's scientists who study this stuff. Like, if the tropics cool, they might dry out, and then you have less monsoon, and then you get crop shortage.
LATIF: Right.
LULU: And, like, then you actually might get more dust.
LATIF: Right, right, right.
HANK GREEN: There is—there's gonna be a chance that it's really bad for everyone, that you set off something that you didn't intend to set off. And then there's also the problem of there are gonna be people who did not decide to do this who are going to be negatively impacted.
SOREN: Right.
HANK GREEN: The hubris is—is like, we finally found the textbook definition, you know? Like, let's change the whole planet—the only one we have—and just hope?
LULU: So Hank is like yeah, global geoengineering, where you don't know what the effects are, that's bad.
HANK GREEN: Yeah, it's terrifying. But the opportunity to learn a bunch about this extra cloud formation over the last decades, here's an area of the planet that, like, we created clouds on and now we're not creating clouds on it anymore, and we get to see what the effect of that is.
SOREN: Hank's point is that we can take this smaller local thing that already happened, look at the data and find out did it have no effect or half the effect we thought, or only over here but it turned out in the long term it had a different effect, those are all questions that would be really useful to know the answers to.
HANK GREEN: The opportunity to study this is huge. And I don't—like, I don't know how else we'd get data like this.
LATIF: So he's not saying do it, he's just saying, like, research it.
LULU: But that brings us to the other flavor of anger Hank was seeing in response to his thread ...
HANK GREEN: There were people who were like, "Shh, don't tell people about this."
LULU: There are some people, including climate scientists, who say we shouldn't even talk about geoengineering, like, at all.
HANK GREEN: Yeah. That—the main thing is you don't give the fossil fuel industry a way out that's not, don't burn fossil fuels anymore.
LATIF: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that's the—not to belittle that because, like, that's the trap. That is like a purposeful playbook pioneered by the tobacco industry. You know, cast doubt but also point in every direction at any possible shiny thing you can that will distract from the one thing, the one big thing that you are doing that we actually need to change for anything to get better.
HANK GREEN: Yeah. And I've seen it, and I saw it in response to that thread. I saw people say, "See? Environmentalists were wrong the whole time. We shouldn't be doing all of this extra work. We can keep burning fossil fuels. Let's just put sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere and solve the problem that way. Fossil fuels are fine." Like, I saw that.
LATIF: Even as you all are describing geoengineering, like, my back gets thrown up and I'm like, "Oh God, like, I'm nervous about that. I'm nervous about talking about this."
LULU: Yeah. No, I—I hear it, and I think it's a real question: whether it's dangerous to even talk about geoengineering in case people think, "Oh, okay. Let's—let's go ahead and do that." Or they think it means that they don't have to worry about reducing fossil fuel emissions.
HANK GREEN: But if we don't talk about it, they'll still find it and they will joyfully misinterpret it, and it will be the first time a lot of people hear about it."
LULU: Hmm, yeah.
HANK GREEN: And I'd rather have it the first time that people hear about it be from somebody who is perfectly aware that climate change is real. [laughs] And I especially think that, like, your first exposure to an idea should be a complex one.
SOREN: Hank's argument is basically because geoengineering is already in the room, we need to know how to talk about it,
HANK GREEN: We need to figure out whether and how we can do this. Like, if we should. We have to make the decision if we should.
SOREN: Because, Hank says, there might come a point where in addition to solving the global long-term problem, we might need to deal with some more local, more short-term problems.
HANK GREEN: One of the biggest problems with global warming is going to be heat. Like, there's going to be places where it is too hot for people to live without air conditioning, and in those places, if the power goes out, people will just die. Like, in ways that we've never seen. Like, heat kills people already but, like, we need to be confronting the reality that, like, heat is very deadly, and there are going to be people who are going to be thinking, like, are—is there a way to just make it less hot right here, right now?
SOREN: Yeah, but you don't want to go back to putting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. I mean ...
HANK GREEN: But, like, you could do it with other stuff. So you could also, potentially—though this has not been researched as much as it needs to be—just shoot seawater into the air, which is around. Like, there's a lot of seawater when you're on the ocean. You just pump it up, and mist it into the air, maybe even pump it to where the smokestack is, so that it gets hot and goes higher, and then the salt actually can seed the cloud, or the water droplet itself can seed the cloud. And seawater, universally known to be not so bad for the ocean.
LULU: And you'd get your umbrella made of, like, virginal seawater. That sounds so great!
HANK GREEN: They're doing it in Australia right now.
LULU: It's called, apparently, marine cloud brightening.
HANK GREEN: Yes. So in Australia, there is a small-scale experiment that's just trying to make the clouds over the Great Barrier Reef brighter to try and save the Great Barrier Reef.
SOREN: Try to put a little bit of a cool on that and slow things down?
HANK GREEN: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
LULU: Like, that sounds really, like, benevolent and okay.
HANK GREEN: Isn't that interesting, that it sounds benevolent and okay, because maybe it isn't? Like, even if it's local, even if it's temporary, we don't know all the impacts that it's gonna have. Like, you could end up in a world where you—you know, the climate changes in a way that makes it really bad for a certain crop, or that makes it really good for a certain disease, and, like, you wouldn't have thought of that one, and now you've heard it, but what are the ones you haven't thought of?
LULU: Yeah. Like, I will admit I had a conversion this whole journey, these past, like, three weeks of seeing your tweet, researching, getting ready to talk to you, which was that I was like, this is so cool, everyone needs to know about it. But, like, I feel really torn now, because on one hand, like a ship with some salt spraying feels fine and nice and lovely. But then it's like is that just a shiny distraction, like—and more than that, when it comes to nature, there are just—as you were saying, there's so many things we don't know, that we don't even know we don't know. And the stakes couldn't be higher.
SOREN: Yeah.
LULU: When I think about any chance that someone out there could take this wrong or hear this wrong or decide to jump in whole hog, I'm almost like, just put it back in the box.
SOREN: We can't, though. That's not ours. That's not for us to do.
LULU: I know, but, like, can't we just be like ...
SOREN: No. No.
LULU: But, like, human cloning. Like that. Like, what if we're just like, "Don't?"
HANK GREEN: Yeah, there's things we keep in boxes—for a little while at least.
SOREN: The three of us shushing is not gonna put anything in a box.
LULU: Where are you on that? So what would you say to me? Because part of me is like, you're leaving, I'm gonna press delete. Like—like, what would you say to me, who's, like, actually kind of tipping over into the—like, I see the terror of even talking about it?
HANK GREEN: You know, the reality is that we are doing geoengineering right now, just recklessly and thoughtlessly and ...
SOREN: For capitalist reasons.
LULU: But that's not, like, deliberate geoengineering, right? That's like ...
HANK GREEN: No, so it's not geo—you can't call it geoengineering. Like, it's just—it's like geo-screwing around.
SOREN: Geo-accidentaleering.
HANK GREEN: [laughs] Yeah.
LULU: Like, but we are changing the climate. So you're saying we already do it already.
HANK GREEN: Also, like, what we all know is that we should put less CO2 into the atmosphere, and also we should take CO2 out, so that's gonna probably be necessary. Like, it isn't just gonna be taking—it isn't just gonna be stopping producing it, it's gonna be taking it out. And taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is geoengineering.
LULU: Geoengineering. Yeah, like carbon capture stuff.
HANK GREEN: And it will have negative impacts on some people, as well as positive impacts on others. Like, we're okay with that. So, like, that's a geoengineering that we're okay with, and we have to figure out, like, where we're not okay. And I am not here to convince Lulu Miller that geoengineering is a good idea. Like, I would love for someone to convince me which way I should feel, because I don't know. I definitely think we should study it.
SOREN: And talk about it.
LATIF: Yeah. So long as we're talking about the real problem and real solutions at the same time.
LULU: Yeah.
HANK GREEN: Right. But, like, I don't think that we can make a decision by ignoring it.
LULU: That is like, literally, I was talking about that in therapy this morning.
HANK GREEN: [laughs]
LULU: Yeah, point taken. "Don't just ignore it." So I see your point, that it's like, the talking about it could help us to really shut it down.
HANK GREEN: Or at least to—at least to take the chance with this North Atlantic situation to understand it better. The difference between how bad it is now and how bad it could get is very big. And weirdly, that makes me hopeful, because it means that there's slack. And I don't know. I, like, really—I believe in humanity, and I think that we're remarkable problem-solving machines when we recognize problems and look for truth and work together. And, you know, that's what science is about.
LATIF: Thank you to Hank Green for coming on to talk to us about this.
LULU: Thanks also to Dr. Colin Carson at Georgetown who studies the potential chain effects of geoengineering. And to Avishay Artsy.
LATIF: This episode was reported by Lulu Miller, with help from Alyssa Jeong Perry.
LULU: It was also produced with help from Alyssa Jeong Perry, with music and mixing help from Jeremy Bloom.
LATIF: This is Radiolab. Thanks for listening.
[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, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Anna Rascouët-Paz, Alyssa Jeong Perry, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster, with help from Timmy Broderick. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]
[LISTENER: Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, 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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