Hello everyone. Welcome to the July 2024 Ask Me Anything Edition of the Mindscape

podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. So, hot enough for you? I don't know where you are

or I don't even know when you're listening to this but here in July

2024 in the United States of America it's been hot outside we've been getting

dueling heat domes over different parts of the country, pushing temperatures pretty high.

In Baltimore, in recent days it's been mid to high 90s pretty regularly and will be in the rest of the week.

And this is depressing to me, not just because it's hot outside.

Okay, sometimes it's hot outside.

But you know, it is our fault in some very legitimate sense that this is happening.

We have brought this on ourselves.

Not the fact that it is 95 today.

Of course, there's a difference between weather and climate as you all know but the fact that there are more days like this than there used to be the fact that the average is higher the fact that the extremes are more extreme, is our fault, right?

We human beings have done this and I know that lots of people have resisted believing

this, you know, as a physicist I can I can point to physics colleagues of mine who

twisted their brains into knots trying to convince themselves that oh it's so

complicated we don't really know there's just so much incentive to not believe these things. It's an interesting

test case, forget about the atmospheric science of it, which is very interesting, but the

psychology of it is very interesting. And I'm mentioning this because it will come up in this

AMA as we go. There's, you know, people are a little frustrated. I'm getting questions

along the lines of, are we doomed?

What can we do?

You know, things seem bad.

...