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I've scared myself over and over and again. I've made myself cry over and over again. Oh my God, yeah. It's so hard for me to picture you feeling afraid because you're just such a big dude. Heyo, Lulu here. The other day I sat down with Radiolab's director of sound design, Dylan Keefe. It was late at night. I was mixing this piece on zombies. To talk to him about... I was super freaked out by it.
he actually does on our show. Which was something I thought I understood. He smooths out the cuts in the dialogue. He writes pretty music. But
But when he actually started explaining it to me, I realized I had no idea. Right from dialogue editing, we are deciding, like, how much humanity do we want to be presenting to people? What do you mean? Well, if someone feels particularly nervous being on the air, for example...
You might want to, for the sake of the story, allow that nervousness to breathe. The more he talked about what he was doing, the more I started to see how the choices he was making about pacing. With timing and the right mood. Or music. I can draw some sort of emotional qualities out of the words. We're journalistic ones.
Like he is sitting there thinking really hard about how to give listeners a slice of complexity, both what a person is intentionally saying with their words and unintentionally revealing with their behaviors. Yeah, totally. It kind of blew my mind.
And the thing is, Dylan is just one of 22 people on this team thinking obsessively about every choice they make in the name of bringing you audio that showcases complexity, that makes you feel, that doesn't waste your time, teaches you something new. And I'm just coming on here for one last time during the fall pledge season to say that if work like this matters to you, now is an amazing time to support us,
Thank you.
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making you care. So one more time, if you want to check it out, radiolab.org slash join. Join the party. Thanks for listening on today's show. Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. See? Yeah. Okay, Latif, hello. Hello. Welcome. Thanks. To Radiolab.
Where am I? While you were on vacation, I got into some reporting hijinks. Okay. Okay, well, where did you go on vacation? I went to Iceland. 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, there was a pretty stunning and kind of terrifying sight.
Okay. Okay.
Anyway, hey Hank, I got my... I also brought Soren, our editor, with me and together we called up the guy who I first heard about all this from. I'm Hank Green. I make internet content. Like? I make a lot of science TikToks and tweets and YouTube videos. You familiar with this gentleman? Yeah, of course. 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. Yeah. But he's also written novels and founded several media companies. Yeah. Busy guy. Well, we are so, thank you. We know you didn't really want to do this.
I just wanted to be very clear where I was coming from. This story is going to get a little tricky, but it all started for Hank in the middle of summer 2023, 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. Mentally, I was in a weird spot. I mean, I was in the midst of being treated for cancer. And during that time, I was in a weird spot.
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 make stuff. And Hank says he would spend a lot of his downtime sort of just reading, researching, looking online. And I had been confronted by a lot of really sort of apocalyptic. We are reaching the end.
Doomsday prepper kind of people on TikTok. Having a panic attack for the last hour. Who were looking at
And all of these TikTokers are pointing to this one chart. And here, I can show it to you right here. Oh, you just shared it with me? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
So it's basically a graph of the sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic over the last couple decades. It's kind of a pretty graph, 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 there's a red line, which is this year. And that line is creeping up, up, up. And then it has a spike. Sudden red decline.
Uh-oh. Yeah. Yeah. And that line is like way above the average, even the seasonal ups and downs. It's not even close. Like the high jumper has cleared the pole. Yeah. Yeah. And this spike is happening over the course of months or weeks or? I think it's days. Days. Oh. An existential threat to everything we know. So all the TikTokers are basically like. This is it. It's happening now. This is us falling over the cliff. We're falling over the cliff.
figure out your relationship with Jesus Christ. And are you watching this stuff literally like while you're getting chemo? Yeah, I probably didn't see it like during the moment when the chemo was going into my body, but certainly during the times when I was... It does tend to be when people doom scroll there. I was just picturing like...
Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, so I'd seen this and... Are we all about to die? You may have seen this graph. If you haven't, I'm sorry. And Hank decides to hop on TikTok himself. Like I made a little series that was like trying to like contextualize it. We're not there yet. We're not anywhere close to there. At the time I was seeing and I was like, I don't like it.
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 on El Nino. So El Nino is just like a warmer climate time generally. And you take one little spot on the globe and blips happen. You know, there's natural variation across the earth. I don't know. 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. Totally. And to be clear, Hank takes care.
this stuff very seriously. 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 we're a family of environmentalists. My mom's a sociologist who worked on sustainability. And I have a degree in environmental studies. I've been in this for a long time. And it's very scary. 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 you 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 –
Right. If you're too scared, you like tip into nihilism kind of. Yeah. And this is like it's going to 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 about.
And like there's like not really too worried about climate change until and unless you give up on trying to solve the problem. So like. 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. There was a sort of a mathematics of gambling guy.
which isn't really 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 getting like on the news. Huh.
And so Hank thought maybe this is a moment to dampen rather than, you know, fan the flames. Being able to act because that takes time. But also keep the conversation focused on things that we might be able to do. Over the next week or two on my TikTok, I'm going to 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. So that is how Hank is spending this hot, hot summer. Going through chemo, holding a candle for hope.
battling climate nihilism...
And then... I was scrolling science news in bed late at night, like before going to sleep. Like I do. Yep. He comes across a link to an article that made him sit straight up in bed. Yeah. It's like 11 o'clock at night. I have to get up at 7.30 in the morning. And I'm like, oh, I'm going to read a lot right now. Okay. So the thing he sees, it's this article in science. It's a write-up of three recent studies. Exactly.
And what they found is that the spike in the North Atlantic sea temperatures, this like troublingly warming water. This year's spike. That one we were talking about. This year's recent spike 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. Yeah. 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. Right. How? All right. So let's go back to before this regulation, this change had happened. All these big, hulky cargo ships are crisscrossing the North Atlantic, chugging along with their big smokestacks, puffing out big plumes of smoggy smoke. Cargo ships burn like the dirtiest oil. It's like the oil that's left at the bottom. Like that mayonnaise-y, black mayonnaise-y. Yeah, you have to like heat it up before it'll even...
flow kind of oil. 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. Okay. And that's horrible. 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. Hmm.
Which is why the UN wanted to regulate it. But it turns out that in addition to being horrible for human health and making acid rain, sulfur dioxide also does something else. 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. Hank actually showed us a picture of this that was taken from space. These tracks are like so
Okay.
Which keeps the water at least a little bit cooler.
So you, 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, and the ocean is getting blasted by the sun. Got it. It's not unanticipated. This is actually something that climate scientists have known about for decades, but it is not intuitive. And what this means is that overall we have not...
the actual full effects of the carbon dioxide. It's like 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. Right. And if you get rid of that, you're going to realize just how bad it really is. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
That feels like, oh, this is doomy. This now seems like a doom on a doom to me. Yeah, I agree. I feel like it's a double-decker doom. We're just going to burn. I go to more denialism. I mean, I found this very exciting and fascinating. But not Hank Green. He reads this study and sees a silver lining. A literal silver lining.
In the smog cloud. A smog cloud that isn't there anymore. Right. 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. He.
Yeah.
And now that we've taken the umbrella away, we can measure how big or small that cooling effect was. But then 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? Huh. So like, can we find a cleaner way to do the cloud umbrella just on purpose this time? Yeah. So it's like he reads a ton more. He gets really excited. He goes to bed and dreams of like data and hope and ship.
And then he wakes up the next day and fires out this like big Twitter thread kind of explaining what he sees. And oh boy. When we come back, we are headed straight into the hot water that Hanks hopes landed him in. Stick with us.
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Kamala Harris's presidential campaign has centered on her record as a tough prosecutor with an eye toward justice. But what does her time as California's so-called top cop reveal about her stance on policies that would prevent deaths like Sonia Massey's at the hands of police? I'm Kai Wright. Join me to talk about Harris, the prosecutor, and Harris, the presidential hopeful, on the next Notes from America. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. We're back talking with Hank Green alongside our editor, Soren Wheeler. And Hank has just hit publish on a long Twitter thread explaining how we might be able to learn something about how to make clouds to keep the ocean cool. Do you remember 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. Go. Do you remember the first one you read and how it felt? It might have been that one. Yeah. That was, by the way, a quoted tweet. No, there was only like three no. I think it was no, no, no. I think it was the tweet. I mean, certainly it triggered like, please explain to me what I have stepped in here.
So what Hank had stepped in was a heated and sometimes vicious debate among climate activists and climate scientists about a little thing called geoengineering. This would not be the first choice. No, or third or fourth choice. So geoengineering 101, what is it, first of all?
So, yeah, the 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. Like just do whatever you can to cool things down. 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 into
And then there's like a shadow on the planet in that area. Like, that's not really what is being proposed. But OK, 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, Yuri Luzov, trying to spray a mist of cement into
On clouds to prevent snowfall. Yeah. A mist of cement is never a phrase I thought I would ever hear. 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. To put sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere. Hmm.
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 would float around the whole planet and be a very thin umbrella wherever it ends up.
And also in the stratosphere, it would stay there for a long time. How long? Like years. And there's a lot about this that we just don't know. Like we don't know exactly what's going to get coolest, what's going to get warmer. We don't know how diseases are going to move around in that world. 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 they're 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 and like then you actually might get more dust. Right, right, right, right. There is going to 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 going to be people who did not decide to do this who are going to be negatively impacted. Hubris is like that. Like, wait, we finally found the textbook definition, you know, like let's change the whole planet. The only one we have and just hope. So Hank is like, yeah, global geoengineering where you don't know what the effects are. That's bad. 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's like we created clouds on and now we're not creating clouds on it anymore. And we get to see what the effect of
of that is. 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. The opportunity to study this is huge. And I don't know how else we'd get data like this. So he's not saying do it.
He's just saying, like, research it. But that brings us to the other flavor of anger. Hank was seeing a response to his thread. There were people who were like, don't tell people about this. There are some people, including climate scientists, who say we shouldn't even talk about geoengineering, like at all. Yeah, that their main thing is you don't give the fossil fuel industry a way out that's
don't burn fossil fuels anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that's 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 world
one thing, the one big thing that you are doing that we actually need to change for anything to get better. Yeah. And I've seen it. And I saw it in response to that threat. 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 in the atmosphere and solve the problem that way. Fossil fuels are fine.
Like, I saw that. 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. Yeah, no, I hear it. Like, 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 go ahead and do that. Or they think it means that they don't have to worry about reducing fossil fuel emissions. But, oh, 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah.
And I especially think that your first exposure to an idea should be a complex one. Hank's argument is basically, because geoengineering is already in the room, we need to know how to talk about it. We need to figure out whether and how we can do this, if we should. We have to make the decision.
if we should. 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. 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, like in, in ways that we've never seen, like heat kills people already, but like the, the,
We 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, is there a way to just make it less hot right here, right now? Yeah, but you don't want to go back to putting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. I mean, 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. Uh, when you're on the ocean, you just pump it up and tends to be there and missed 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, uh,
universally known to be not so bad for the ocean. And you'd get your umbrella made of like virginal seawater. That sounds so great. They're doing it in Australia right now. It's called apparently marine cloud brightening. Yes. So in Australia, there's 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. Try to put a little bit of a cool on that and slow things down. Mm hmm.
Like that sounds really like benevolent and OK. Isn't that interesting that it sounds benevolent? OK, 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 going to 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? Yeah. Yeah.
Like, I will admit I had a conversion this whole journey these past like three weeks of seeing the 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? 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. When I think about any chance that someone out there could take this wrong or hear this wrong, I'm like,
or decide to jump in whole hog. I'm almost like, just put it back in the box. We can't though. That's not ours. That's not for us to do. I know, but like, can't we just be like, well, like human cloning? Like, what if we're just like, don't? Yeah. There's things we keep in boxes for a little while at least. The three of us shushing is not going to put anything in a box. So what would you say to me? Because part of me
He's like, you're leaving. I'm going to press delete. 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? You know, the reality is that we are doing geoengineering right now just recklessly and thoughtlessly and for capitalist reasons. But that's.
That's not like deliberate geoengineering, right? That's like. No. So it's not. You can't call it geoengineering. Like it's just it's like geo screwing around. Like but we are changing the climate. So you're saying we already do it already. 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 going to probably be necessary. Like it isn't just going to be taking, it isn't just going to be stopping producing. It's going to be taking it out and taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is geoengineering. Yeah, like carbon capture stuff. 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. And talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so long as we're talking about the real problem and real solution at the same time. Yeah. Right. Right.
But like, I don't think that we can make a decision by ignoring it. That is literally I was talking about that in therapy this morning. Point taken. Don't just ignore it. So I see your point. That's like the talking about it could help us to really shut it down. Or to take 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. 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.
Thank you to Hank Green for coming on to talk to us about this. Big thanks also to Dr. Colin Carson at Georgetown, who studies the potential chain effects of geoengineering. And to Avishai Artsy. This episode was reported by Lulu Miller with help from Alyssa Jung-Perry. It was also produced with help from Alyssa Jung-Perry with music and mixing help from Jeremy Bloom. This is Radiolab.
Thanks for listening.
Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Aketi Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Jnanasambadam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Anna Raskwit-Paz, Alyssa Jong-Perry, Sarah Sambach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Timmy Broderick.
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