Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing

the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense

Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed

to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads

on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.

So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

My guest today is Joseph Rome. Joe is one of the country's most influential communicators on

climate science and solutions. He was chief science advisor for the show Years of Living Dangerously,

which won the 2014 Emmy Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Series. He is the founding editor of

Climate Progress, which Tom Friedman of the New York Times called the indispensable blog.

In 2009, time named him one of the heroes of the environment and Rolling Stone put a

modest list of 100 people who are, quote, reinventing America. Rome was acting assistant secretary

of energy in 1997, and he's a fellow at American Progress and holds a PhD in physics from MIT.

And perhaps most relevant, he is the author of Climate Change, what everyone needs to know,

put out by Oxford University Press. And it is a very handy, accessible, comprehensive book

that is organized in Q&A format. So every question you have ever had or heard posed skeptical

or otherwise about climate change seems to be answered in this book. And Joe and I get into many

of the details. We talk about how we know the climate is changing and how we know that human

behavior is the primary cause. We talk about feedback mechanisms that increase the problem

of global warming and why small changes in temperature matter so much. We talk about the threats

of sea level rise and desertification and the best and worst case scenarios given where we currently

...