13,000-Year-Old Footprints, Climate Court, Native Bees, Cell Phones And Cancer. March 30, 2018, Part 1

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🗓️ 30 March 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Planting tomatoes in the garden this year? Better hope you have bumblebees too, because tomato flowers need a good shaking to get the pollen out. “What the bumblebee does is grab a tomato flower, curve its abdomen around the bottom of the tomato flower, and then shiver its wing muscles at a specific frequency, shaking pollen out of the holes like a salt shaker,” says Paige Embry, author of Our Native Bees: North America’s Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them. This week, a panel of peer reviewers met for three days to discuss a draft report on two long-running studies on the potential health effects of cell phone radiation. In their conclusions, and voted to increase the level of confidence in the findings, saying that there was a clear link between the radiofrequency radiation exposure and the male rat heart tissue tumors. The National Toxicology Program now has to decide whether to accept the panel’s recommendation before the final report is released. In this week's State of Science, a judge requested a climate science tutorial in a federal lawsuit where two California cities are suing the oil company Chevron. In an unprecedented courtroom tutorial on climate science, Chevron went on record agreeing with the scientific consensus that people are causing global warming. But the company also deflected any responsibility for it under federal law and played up uncertainties in projections for both the volume and future consequences of greenhouse gas emissions. The tack signals a potential legal defense against financial liability for climate change impacts such as rising sea levels.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Our current era of climate change is unprecedented in human history, but it's not the first time the Earth has been through such a change.
0:11.3	56 million years ago, shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs, the planet warmed faster than it has at any other point in time except for today.
0:22.7	Can something be learned from history repeating itself?
0:26.1	Here to discuss that question and other short subjects in science.
0:29.7	Sarah Kaplan, science reporter for the Washington Post.
0:32.7	Welcome back.
0:33.4	Thanks.
0:33.7	Good to see you in person.
0:34.6	Yeah, good to see you too.
0:35.6	All right, let's talk about this.
0:58.2	So what happened 56 million years ago? Why was it getting warmer? Yeah, so it's this period called the Paleocene-Aocene Thermal Maximum. Oh, wow. If you don't run out of oxygen, just getting the name out, it's actually a really critical period in Earth's history. For the course of about 5,000 years, huge amounts of carbon were released into the atmosphere, something between 4 and 7 trillion tons.
1:01.4	And 5,000 years doesn't sound like a lot.
1:03.5	It doesn't sound very short, but it's really fast geologically speaking.
1:07.2	And we know what happens when carbon goes into the atmosphere, the Earth heats up.
1:10.7	So we think that the Earth heated about 5 to 8 degrees Celsius.
1:13.6	And if you think about in that today's terms, we're talking about trying to limit Earth's
1:17.6	the rise in temperature to 2 degrees.
1:19.6	So that was quite a lot at the time.
1:21.6	So you had ocean warming and acidification and weird weather and all the stuff that went along.
1:25.6	Yeah, so I mean some of the things we're seeing now, those same things happened during the PETM.
1:31.9	There were mass extinctions.
1:33.7	Mammals actually got smaller.
	...

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