Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and I'm doing something a little bit unusual

in the podcast today in the sense that you know I like doing unusual things. We're always trying to experiment here

but usually every episode is completely different in topic than the previous episode and the following episode

but you can think of this week's episode and last weeks as sort of a matched set.

Last week we talked to Ramesh Nam about the optimistic view on our energy future, how we can switch to renewable energies

and really combat global climate change. Today I'm talking to Michael Mann who is a professor of atmospheric science,

he's the distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University,

one of the most informed and most well-known experts on the bad part of climate change.

That is to say how fast it's happening, the evidence for it and the deleterious effects it's going to have on our world.

So I think that because climate change is so challenging, this is the right order to have these podcasts in.

It's optimistic as we want to be, it's really really important to keep the challenges in mind.

Mike Mann of course is famous or infamous for being involved in all sorts of political controversies in climate change.

Not really his fault if you look into the information but he and his co-authors were the author of the original

hockey stick paper and graph where you could see over hundreds of years how the earth's temperature had been more or less static

and then was zooming up in recent times, the so-called hockey stick graph.

That got him the ire of all sorts of well-financed opposition people.

So we talked a little bit about that but honestly we spend most of our time in this episode talking about the science.

Mike was actually a physics undergraduate major and so he knows that I'm a physicist so we dig in a little bit

to the physics of how the earth's climate is changing, how we know that it's changing and what we might do about it.

Even though this is sort of the pessimistic of the two shows there's still some reason for optimism here.

Basically it's in our hands what we want to do.

That's always true but for climate change it's an especially urgent message.

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