19/08/2020

Death Valley Temperature Rises To 54.4c – Possibly The Hottest Ever Reliably Recorded

The Guardian - 

US National Weather Service’s automated station at Furnace Creek in California hit extreme high at 3:41pm on Sunday

If the Death Valley temperature is verified, it would beat the previous hottest August day for the United States. Photograph: Steve Marcus/Reuters

A temperature of 54.4C – or 129.9F – has been recorded in Death Valley, California, in what some extreme weather watchers believe could be the hottest reading ever reliably recorded on the planet.

The United States National Weather Service’s automated weather station at Furnace Creek near the border with Nevada hit the extreme high at 3:41pm on Sunday afternoon, a statement said.

“This observed high temperature is considered preliminary and not yet official,” a statement from NWS Las Vegas said.

“If verified, this will be the hottest temperature officially verified since July of 1913, also at Death Valley.”

If the temperature reading is verified, it would beat the previous hottest August day for the United States.

Death Valley’s all-time record high, according to the World Meteorological Organization, is 134F (56.7°C) taken on 10 July 1913 at Greenland Ranch. That reading still stands as the hottest ever recorded on the planet’s surface, according to the WMO.

The Death Valley 1913 reading was installed as the planet’s hottest after a 2013 WMO investigation dismissed a 58C temperature supposedly recorded in Libya in September 1922.

A committee concluded the Libya reading was likely wrong, with human error, the type of thermometer used and inconsistencies with other temperatures in the region all contributing to that temperature being struck off.

But Christopher Burt, from a private US meteorological service, who prompted the investigation into the Libya record, has also challenged the legitimacy of the 1913 Death Valley readings, saying they were “essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective”.

Speaking to the Washington Post, Prof Randy Cerveny, of Arizona State University, who leads a WMO group that maintains an archive of climate extremes, said of the new Death Valley temperature reading: “Everything I’ve seen so far indicates that is a legitimate observation.”

He was recommending the WMO “preliminarily accept the observation” but that the reading would be examined in detail in the coming weeks.

The only other WMO-verified temperature record higher than those taken at Death Valley are from July 1931 at Kebili in Tunisia, where a reading of 131F (55C) was taken.

But like many older temperature readings, this too has been challenged.

Some extreme weather watchers believe the most recent Death valley reading could – in time – be verified as the hottest ever reliably recorded on the planet.

Bob Henson, a meteorologist, told a blog of the American Geophysical Union: “It’s quite possible the Death Valley high set a new global heat record. The extreme nature of the surrounding weather pattern makes such a reading plausible, so the case deserves a solid review.

“There are nagging questions about the validity of even hotter reports from Death Valley in 1913 and Tunisia in 1931. What we can say with high confidence is that, if confirmed, this is the highest temperature observed on Earth in almost a century.”

Prof James Renwick, a climate scientist at Victoria University of Wellington, has taken part in WMO efforts to check temperature readings.

He said the Death Valley reading would need to be checked and verified before any record could be confidently declared. Checks would be made of the instruments to make sure there had been no changes at the Death Valley site, which is close to a visitors’ centre at Furnace Creek.

He said: “There will be a lot of cross-checking to make sure that that value is correct.”

Elsewhere in California, record high temperatures led to wildfires, at least one of which was reported to have turned into a “firenado”. This rarely recorded phenomenon occurs when hot air from a fire on the ground rises in a tall column and starts to rotate in the winds higher off the ground, giving the appearance of a tornado mixed with fire.

The heatwave in the west of the US has also given rise to lightning storms which may start further wildfires, leading agencies in the region to put out warnings.

Persistently high temperatures have been recorded in many areas of the northern hemisphere this summer, giving added weight to the prediction made earlier this year that it could be the hottest on record, as the Earth’s climate changes under human influence. Most concerning for climate scientists has been a “heatwave” recorded in the Arctic.

A record temperature of 38C was observed in Siberia in June, with the Arctic sea ice shrinking to its lowest extent for 40 years in July. Siberian temperatures were more than 5C above average from January to June. New research has suggested that on current trends the Arctic could be ice-free in summer as soon as 2035.

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Impressive data set shows July likely warmest of any month since 1850 worldwide

MLive - Mark Torregrossa

July is going to likely go down as the warmest month ever recorded in a global temperature dataset with observations back to 1850.

Berkeleyearth.org has produced their report on global temperatures for July 2020. One place I like to start on these reports is to just stare at the global temperature deviation map.

Temperature deviation from the July average of 1951 to 1980. (Source: berkeleyearth.org)

The map above shows how cold or warm July 2020 was from the long-term average July temperature. Notice we see a lot of red and not much blue.

More locations around the globe were in the warmest rankings for their locations versus locations in the coldest rankings. In fact, in just a few locations we had some of the coolest rankings.

Temperature rank in deviation from the 1951 to 1980 average (Source: berkeleyearth.org)

Analysis
  • July 2020 is tied with July 2019 as the warmest July since records began in 1850.
  • As July is usually the warmest month globally, tying the July record also means that July 2020 is tied for the warmest month overall.
  • A transition towards La Niña conditions continue in the Pacific.
  • Accounting for the likely impact of La Niña, updated projections for the rest of 2020 give a 36% chance that 2020 will be a new record warm year.
I talked with Zeke Hausfather, research scientist at berkeleyearth.org about the dataset.

It’s an impressive dataset they used for this report. They have merged several datasets together using 40,000 weather stations worldwide and 14,000 current weather stations.

Some of the weather stations have been reporting data back to 1850.

Hausfather addressed the often questioned reliability of changing technology over almost 200 years.

He says the U.S. temperature dataset had two big changes in technology to liquid and glass thermometers in the 1950s and digital thermometers in the 1980s.

If data just didn’t look consistent with surrounding stations, an individual station was taken out.

I relayed the often asked question of how jumps in technology could keep a consistent dataset.

Many feel like that jump to new technology could be the reason temperatures show up warmer. Zeke says the new technology was actually colder than older ways of reading temperatures.

Temperature deviation (in °C) from the 1951 to 1980 average global temperature. (Source: berkeleyearth.org)

Hausfather says what really strikes him is the very strong El Niño year of 1998, once the warmest year ever, is now colder than the last seven years.

Earth's average temperature by month back to 1850. (Source: berkeleyearth.org)

The funding for this report and other research at berkeleyearth.org comes from various organizations that are known to have opposite viewpoints on global warming.

Earth has warmed about two degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years, with much of that warming happening since 1980.

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More Than Half Of World's Oceans Already Being Affected By Climate Change

Phys.org - University of Reading

Credit: CC0 Public Domain



More than 50% of the world's oceans could already be affected by climate change, with this figure rising as high as 80% over the coming decades, a new study has shown.

Scientists used and observations in deeper areas of worldwide to calculate for the first time the point at which changes to temperatures and salt levels—good indicators of the impact of human-induced climate change—would overpower natural variations.

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, estimates that 20-55% of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans now have noticeably different temperatures and salt levels, while this will rise to 40-60% by the middle of the century, and to 55-80% by 2080.

It also found the Southern Hemisphere oceans are being affected more rapidly by climate change than the Northern Hemisphere, with changes having been detectable there since as early as the 1980s.

Professor Eric Guilyardi, co-author at the University of Reading and LOCEAN-IPSL, Laboratory of Oceanography and Climate in Paris, said: "We have been detecting ocean temperatures change at the surface due to climate change for several decades now, but changes in vast areas of the ocean, particularly deeper parts, are much more challenging to detect."

Yona Silvy, a doctoral student at LOCEAN-IPSL/Sorbonne University, and lead author of the study, said: "We were interested in whether the levels of temperatures and salt were great enough to overcome natural variability in these deeper areas, that is if they had risen or fallen higher than they ever would during the normal peaks and troughs. This affects global ocean circulation, sea level rise and poses a threat to and ecosystems."

Previous studies have gauged the impact of climate change on the ocean by looking at surface temperatures, rainfall and , but few have looked at the regional effects deeper down in the ocean to get a more complete picture.

The effects of change are harder to detect in deeper, more insulated parts of the ocean, where heat and salt spread at a slower rate due to weaker mixing processes. It is also difficult in areas that are poorly observed or where natural variability is high.

Yona Silvy and her co-authors used model simulations with and without the impact of human activity and an analysis that combines both and ocean salt to detect significant changes and their date of likely detection, also known as "time of emergence". Yet these are regions that will keep the memory of these changes for decades to centuries.

Changes detectable above natural variability were calculated to be seen in the Northern Hemisphere oceans between 2010-2030, meaning increases or decreases in temperature and levels are likely to have already taken place.

The more rapid and earlier changes seen in the Southern Hemisphere emphasises the importance of the Southern Ocean for global heat and carbon storage as surface waters make their way to the deeper ocean more easily there. However, this part of the world is also particularly poorly observed and sampled, meaning changes are likely to remain undetected for longer.

The scientists argue that improved ocean observation and greater investment in ocean modelling is necessary to monitor the extent of the impact of on the world's oceans, and predict more accurately the wider effect this could have on the planet.

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18/08/2020

We’ve Got To Start Thinking Beyond Our Own Lifespans If We’re Going To Avoid Extinction

The Guardian - 

Short-term analysis of ways to save society, and indeed humanity, is useless

Amiens Cathedral, France: built across several lifetimes during the 13th century. Photograph: Alamy

Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
In a biology lesson about the bacterial growth curve, the parallels with the climate crisis were hard to miss.

Stick bacteria in a test tube with food and their population will grow exponentially until, eventually, they run out of resources and kill themselves off.

Even a couple of decades ago, the comparison with humanity’s predicament felt glaringly obvious; and we have not really strayed since from the inevitable path to extinction.

The hope seems to be that a big crisis might be the shock we need to change course. But we are living through the biggest global crisis for decades – and are travelling and consuming less as a result of the pandemic – yet it already seems unlikely that much will change. It’s easy enough to throw around the old adage “never waste a good crisis”. But when it comes to existential questions about the future of humanity, it has proved fairly useless.

Coronavirus or not, we remain locked into a treadmill that measures progress by growing GDP rather than by wellbeing and environmental sustainability. This is an economic paradigm that has served most of us – particularly the most affluent – pretty well for decades.

But the richer we’ve got, the more the benefits have tailed off. There have been a number of studies showing that, beyond a certain point, more wealth does not necessarily equal more happiness – true at a societal level as well as an individual one.

There is a lot that could account for this flatlining. It was once assumed that increased productivity, driven by technological progress, would result in us having more leisure time: see John Maynard Keynes’s prediction in the 1930s that we’d be working just 15 hours a week by now.

But instead, luxury beat leisure and an explosion in consumerism has driven us towards ever more consumption. The “happiness” economist Richard Layard has also pointed towards “disorders of development” such as obesity and tech addiction (although it should be noted that within a wealthy society such as ours, obesity is associated with poverty).
For a while after the 2008 crash, it looked as if things might change – economists designed global ‘happiness’ indices
The costs of this consumption have increased. Much of it is subsidised by labour exploitation, both at home and abroad. And then there is the small issue of catastrophic climate change, as we race towards “tipping points” beyond which global heating becomes self-reinforcing and harder to halt without unprecedented levels of coordinated international action.

Stack all this up, and the idea of already-rich societies moving towards a “zero growth” economic model – once the preserve of the radical green fringes of politics – starts to look increasingly like a no-brainer.

We would have to sacrifice gains in material living standards, but the potential prize would be preserving the planet and achieving a better worklife balance. If we could protect the least affluent from any negative impacts – which would require more redistribution, not to mention paying more for services such as caring and cleaning – what’s not to like?

The big problem is, of course, no one knows how to get there. The 2008 financial crisis offered a chance to take stock. For a while, it looked like something might happen: economists designed global “happiness” indices and the UN General Assembly declared a “world happiness day”. But not only did nothing change: it was used as political cover for darker agendas.

Bhutan adopted a measure for Gross National Happiness in an attempt to market itself globally as the “happiness” country, while papering over its record of human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing. In the UK, David Cameron pledged to set up a national wellbeing index as he cut back mental health services, youth services and children’s centres.

We’re back there again: happiness advocates saying we can’t afford to waste this opportunity to rethink, even as the government has prioritised pubs over schools – economic recovery over broader measures of wellbeing – in relaxing the lockdown.

This is no surprise. Our political and economic systems are utterly indisposed to the radical shifts we need to promote wellbeing over wealth and protect the planet. Short-termism is everywhere, from politicians who face elections every few years to company directors who must account for quarterly results.

On the right, there are powerful vested interests who want to maintain business as usual – who go quiet in the wake of a crisis, or even appear to jump on the bandwagon (just look at Davos agendas in recent years), but who do all in their power to obstruct change.

The left often makes peace with continuous growth, despite its costs, because a rising tide makes redistribution easier. And it is crazy to think that a shock to GDP caused by a financial crisis or a pandemic could be used as a bridge to a different world because the brunt of the pain is always, always borne by the least affluent and the young.

So we need to think far more about the mechanisms and institutions that could get us on to a different path. The Long Time Project is exploring how humans could shift their time horizons so, simply put, we feel more emotionally connected to our future descendants. It points to the fact that we tend to view our future selves, let alone future generations, as strangers.

We need to rewire the way we think about the future, and our own ageing and deaths; the projects’ founders believe that art and culture can play an important role. And we could learn from those times in history when humans have proved their ability to think beyond their own lifespan: “cathedral thinking” is based on those architects who planned spectacular buildings that would never be finished in their own lifetimes.

It’s no exaggeration to say that, unless we find a way to think differently about consumption, wellbeing and sustainability, humans will be responsible for our own extinction. And it should be clear by now that crises – extreme weather, pandemics, financial crises – are never going to be the wake-up call that forces us to confront our own fragility.

A good crisis inevitably goes to waste, and it is lazy and irresponsible to think otherwise.

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What I Learned Covering The Climate Crisis For 15 Years

Poynter - 

Vanessa Hauc, news anchor at Noticias Telemundo, stands in the aftermath of a devastating forest fire. Courtesy Noticias Telemundo

Being a climate journalist has never been so critical.

For the past 15 years, I’ve been reporting on environmental issues for Noticias Telemundo and I can tell you that this is the most important story of our times, the story journalists critically need to tell.

But it’s also one of the most difficult stories to cover. The challenges we’re facing today, with our planet changing at a rapid pace, can make the task of covering climate seem overwhelming at times.

As a climate journalist, I have to report every day on storms that become monster hurricanes in a matter of hours. I have to cover fires that ravage the Amazon jungle, devastating everything. I have to witness the sorrow and desperation of people who are forced to leave everything behind after years of drought or report on the extinction of rare plants and animals.

We’re at a unique point in history, one of those crossroads that define fate, not only for us but for future generations. Leading scientists tell us we only have 10 years to turn around and create a carbon-neutral economy. That alone is a huge task. Achieving it will require a monumental effort to transform the way we live. This, in turn, will call for a lot of guidance and information. Climate journalists will clearly play a key role in that process.

Here is what I’ve learned over nearly two decades of crisis reporting about being effective:

Focus on the disproportionately vulnerable

When you’re out in the field it’s important to understand that even though climate change affects us all, it doesn’t affect everyone equally. Minorities, women and children and other disempowered groups are mostly affected by the impact of climate change.

Ironically, these groups are also the ones that contribute to the problem the least. Additionally, women are most likely to be displaced by climate change. Women are also the primary caregivers and providers of food for their families and children, making them more vulnerable when a storm or a drought hits.

In the United States, Latinos are disproportionately more affected by our changing climate as half of the Latino population lives in the 25 most polluted cities in the country, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. As a consequence, Latino children are 40% more likely to die from asthma; Latina mothers are more likely to have premature babies; and, according to a recent Harvard study, people who live in polluted areas are more likely to die from COVID-19.

 These are serious implications that must be considered in our reporting on climate change, so we properly highlight the struggle of underrepresented communities.

Don’t let people look away. Demand accountability.

It’s clear that we need to change the way we live if we want a chance at surviving. But, most importantly, there are systemic changes that need to come from the top.

Politicians, business leaders, and policymakers will be key to this transformation. They are the ones who need to create tougher environmental laws. They are the ones who need to innovate and create sustainable companies. And they are the ones who need to be bold and break the status quo to create platforms for the rest of us to live sustainable lives.

As journalists, we have to hold these leaders to account. We have to question their plans, compel them to confront polluters and demand clear answers.

For example, this February I had the opportunity to moderate the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas. I asked former Vice President Joe Biden if he would hold the fossil fuel executives accountable for the damage made to our environment. I pressed him for a clear answer, specifically asking which companies would he hold accountable and how far was he willing to go.

His answer was a compilation of his will to return to the Paris agreement, eliminate the subsidies for big oil and fight for environmental justice issues. Fossil fuel companies knew for decades that their products — oil, natural gas and coal — caused irreversible damage to our planet and did nothing to solve it and instead used deceptive practices to hide the truth.

I asked again: “What would you do with these companies that are responsible for the destruction of our planet?” Biden then answered that if the executives were lying, they should be able to be sued and be held personally accountable.

Courtesy Noticias Telemundo

Hope comes from within

Sometimes this job can be pretty demanding. Last year I traveled to Ecuador to report on our melting glaciers. In the Andes, some glaciers have lost more than half of their ice within the past decades and will be iceless in the next five years.

Immediately after, I went to Bolivia to cover the fire that devastated millions of acres of Amazon jungle. Walking through mile after mile of ash was absolutely heartbreaking. Seeing animals burned and stretched out on the ground gave me a feeling of hopelessness.

In times like these, I choose to focus on life. When I get home, I do yoga, meditate, surround myself with nature and spend time with the ones I love. I practice gratitude every day, and recognize the beauty and perfection of our planet. I see the big picture.

Our planet is an amazing organism capable of sustaining almost 8 billion people and it has an amazing capacity to regenerate. Today we have the technology, the resources and the will of the people to change the way we live. The journey begins with the contribution of each one of us.

I know it won’t be easy. We will have to challenge politicians, polluters and even some newsroom editors. You will come home tired and heartbroken. You will feel the pain of the ones suffering the effects of climate change.

But at the end of the day, I promise you will go to bed with a great feeling of accomplishment that the job you do is actually having a powerful impact. Your stories will touch hearts and change minds. Your words and questions will travel distances.

And when we all leave this planet and complete this great human experience, we will be able to say that the job that we did was so worthwhile. Because of it, children will breathe better air, oceans will be replenished with fish and new coral, animals will walk tall, and our beautiful planet will be renewed.

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Science Has A New Tool In The Fight Against Climate Change: Good Data

Wired - Tom Ward

A European network of carbon monitoring stations is using new approach to data capture that may be the key to reversing the climate crisis

Konsta Punkka

Founded in 2008 and given European Research Infrastructure Consortium status by the EU Commission in 2015, the Integrated Carbon Observation Systems (ICOS) is a network of 130 carbon-measuring stations (along with expertise centres and laboratories) set up to measure greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, as well as how carbon fluxes between the atmosphere, Earth and oceans.

Situated in some of Europe’s most remote locations – from far-flung Nordic mountains to French grasslands and Czech wetlands – each station is designed to provide uniform data on carbon emissions across disparate nations and environments. As one ICOS employee explains, prior to the network, comparing data collected across Europe was “like comparing apples and oranges”.

By making this peer-reviewed data available to scientists and governments worldwide through a centralised portal, ICOS is speeding up our understanding of carbon emissions, and helping scientists keep up with climate change in real time.

"A scientist can start their research by downloading a homogenous dataset available from a single source, instead of collecting measurements from several sources in different formats and of variable quality," says Elena Saltikoff, head of operations at ICOS. “Ultimately, this is about bringing reliable data and knowledge on greenhouse gases to policy makers much faster than was previously possible."

An instrument for measuring greenhouse gases, installed in a field in Hohenpeissenberg, in Bavaria, in southern Germany. Konsta Punkka

ICOS is already changing how scientists study climate change. In September 2018, scientists decided to gather data on the drought that led to the vast summer fires that had ravaged Europe earlier that year. Previously, gathering this data would have taken years. Thanks to ICOS, the researchers had the data by Christmas, with the first research paper currently in progress.

Despite this, ICOS leaders argue that policymakers are still not reacting quickly enough to the threat of climate change. “We still have the huge problem that the reduction of fossil-fuel emissions is too slow,” says ICOS director general Werner Kutsch. “If we want to hit the Paris Agreement targets of staying under a 2°C temperature increase, we need to act much faster.”

Kutsch is actively pushing ICOS to collaborate with researchers from the social sciences, mechanical sciences, behavioural sciences and more behind the climate change banner, in the belief that doing so will help galvanise innovation and help force vital policy change. One of its key developments is in helping governments differentiate between natural and man made carbon emissions.

Measuring greenhouse gases at the Swiss Jungfraujoch station, 3,450m above sea level. Konsta Punkka

Many greenhouse gases occur naturally and are exchanged between the oceans, various ecosystems and the atmosphere. Forests and peatlands, for example, are "sinks", which store carbon dioxide, while forest fires and lakes emit part of it back. Should a sink become significantly weaker – as is currently happening in the Amazon rainforest – Werner believes governments should then be able to use ICOS data to course correct within a timeframe of months rather than years.

The reverse is also possible. Should emissions suddenly decrease, as they have during the global coronavirus pandemic, Kutsch and his team have the chance to see what Earth would look like without the overbearing influence of man.“We can see that carbon emissions are decreasing through shutting down flights and industries not using as much electricity and so on,” says Kutsch. The decrease in emissions coincides with a natural, seasonal decrease that occurs around spring, when more plants remove carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. Kutsch says it should take “some months” for ICOS to collect accurate data on how much of our CO2 reduction is natural, and how much is a result of the pandemic.

A researcher checks scientific instruments in a forest in Lanžhot in the Czech Republic. Konsta Punkka

Whatever the data reveals, Kutsch hopes that the current crisis will help governments view climate change differently. He points to South Korea as an example of a country that took scientists seriously and managed to avoid a catastrophic coronavirus death toll. Once life returns to normal, Kutsch hopes that globally we will all pay more attention to scientists in general.

“I think this is a learning experience,” he says. “Scientists were facing a lot of denial and negative comments in the past, then suddenly we learned from the corona crisis that it is definitely helpful to listen to scientists. I hope this learning experience will last when we’re starting to talk about climate change again.”

He hopes too that this period of slowed-down living will instil lessons of how to move forward. “Perhaps people have learned that not every face to face meeting is necessary and that you can use virtual tools,” he says. “Perhaps behaviour may change, people may learn that it pays to take care of each other. It might be that people find some kind of solidarity between generations, people and countries. In the end, I hope it will improve and strengthen internationalism; in the long run we’ll have to co-operate internationally.”

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17/08/2020

We're Not Here For Doom And Gloom': Meet The Hosts Of Climate Change Podcast How To Save A Planet

The Guardian - 

Alex Blumberg and Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson consider how ordinary people can stop the decline of the planet without feeling terrified, in their ambitious new Spotify series

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Alex Blumberg, presenters of How to Save a Planet. Photograph: PR HANDOUT

For a podcast about the climate crisis, there is a surprising amount of laughter in How to Save a Planet.

Certainly, British listeners – maybe more accustomed to the sober, mournful tone Radio 4 brings to these issues – may feel startled by the sheer quantity of hilarity that the American presenters, Alex Blumberg and Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, find in the subject.

The show’s chattiness, and its decision to refer to listeners as “earthlings”, may grate a little to begin with, but it is worth persisting. Beneath the gossipy drivetime tone, this is a podcast of enormous ambition and seriousness, and one which promises to be fascinating.

The show’s determined sense of can-do optimism reflects the creators’ conviction that it is crucial not to depress listeners excessively if you want them to engage with this challenging subject. “We’re not just going to bum you out, that’s really important,” Blumberg says.

Anyone who writes or broadcasts about the climate crisis is familiar with the difficulty of conveying the urgency of the situation without triggering a profound sense of hopelessness, which prompts people to switch off – literally, in the case of a podcast.

Blumberg, an award-winning radio journalist who has worked on This American Life and co-founded his own podcast company, Gimlet, has collaborated with Johnson, a marine biologist, to try to inspire an active response in listeners.

Blumberg’s involvement comes from a sense that despite this being the greatest challenge of our time, most people seem to be defeated by the enormity of it. “It’s an existential issue that requires a broad sort of collective action,” he says, and yet “it doesn’t really seem that many people are talking about it, the way they should”. This, he thinks, is partly because so much of the conversation has been about the problem and not about possible solutions.

Most reporting, Johnson adds, concludes that the planet is “totally screwed … The ice is melting, the world’s on fire, and scientists continue to show us this in new ways, with new levels of rigour and specificity. And this is important, because it’s critical for us to know what is at stake. But that leaves us with ‘OK, now what?’ kind of feelings. There’s been a lot of great reporting on climate, especially in the last few years, but it’s been kind of hard to connect with. It’s either like doom and gloom, or it’s so fluffy that it’s not going to get us where we need to go. So we were trying to find that sweet spot in the middle.”

This is the territory the podcast wants to inhabit, Blumberg explains. “In the US there’s a very small minority – like 10%, according to polling – of people who deny climate change, but that group has a way, way outsized voice, and because they’re so loud, people think it’s a much bigger group. A lot of media is focused on trying to convince that 10% that it is real and we should really pay attention to it. And then you’ve got a broad group of people who are just terrified already, but they don’t want to read another scary article, because they’re convinced already and they want to know: what can I do that isn’t just, like, recycle more,” he says. “This podcast will take it as a given that it’s happening, but will be asking: what do we as humanity do about it?”



They hope to create an army of activists out of listeners, helping them find a way to participate in planet-saving missions, such as (in episode one) accelerating the move from coal to wind. Shaming people about their carbon footprint has not worked, Johnson says; instead she hopes to help people participate in wider change. “One of the failings of the climate movement to date is that we have been asking everyone to do the same thing. We say: ‘Right, everyone, march! Everyone, donate! Everyone, lower your carbon footprint!’ As opposed to saying: ‘What are you good at? And how can you bring that to this wide array of solutions that are available to us? By showcasing different climate solutions every week, we’re really hoping that people will see something here that they connect with,” she says.

“We already have most of the solutions we need,” says Johnson. It’s just about how we’re going to get them done. We want to create a show that’s focused on solutions and helping people figure out how they can be part of the systems-level change as opposed to individual behaviour change. We need to change our energy system and our transportation system and our manufacturing and our buildings and our agriculture – we don’t just need people to ride their bikes more. And so we’re backing away from the ‘10 quick easiest lifestyle changes’ to saying: we need to change everything. There are people doing this work; we’ll talk to them and let’s figure out how we can all help.”

Before each show concludes, they return to the scientists and energy experts they have interviewed, and ask them to spell out exactly what steps listeners can take. At the end of the first episode, they call on subscribers to look out for and attend council meetings, and support applications for wind farms (pointing out that most members of the public who attend these meetings are local residents with nimbyish concerns about where sites should be). The podcast’s perspective is initially quite US-centric, but the struggles between residents, politicians and energy firms are global.

Throughout the first couple of episodes, Johnson and Blumberg are constantly laughing, trying not to take themselves too seriously. Johnson says she often “gets accused of being optimistic and hopeful”, despite being someone who has dedicated her career to marine biology and “studying an ecosystem that is almost certainly not going to make it”. “The truth is that I’m just a joyful person who understands the science. We certainly take the climate crisis seriously because we know how long the odds are. That doesn’t mean I have to be miserable on a moment-to-moment basis,” she says. Occasionally, though, the reporting for the series reduced both co-presenters to tears – so frequently in an episode about the European Green Deal that editors had to cut some of the segments. “I think I cried three times in that episode and we were like: that’s too many,” she says.

The emotive conversations seem likely to continue. One forthcoming episode asks what the climate movement can learn from Black Lives Matter. (Johnson recently wrote in Time magazine that “We can’t solve the climate crisis without people of colour, but we could probably solve it without racists.”)

The presenters say this is an open-ended series, and Johnson is keen to stick with it. “It is a weekly show – until the job is done.”

Note: How to Save a Planet from Gimlet and Spotify launches on 20 August

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative