Hello, and welcome to the Origins podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause.

In this episode, we'll talk to the geophysicist Dan Shrag. I first learned about Dan as he gained

national prominence for his groundbreaking work on paleo climate, particularly the striking

snowball Earth hypothesis, now widely accepted that the Earth froze over completely on several

occasions between 600 and 800 million years ago. Since then, he's become a leading figure

studying current climate change, as well as energy policy and technology.

He directs Harvard's Center for the Environment and the Program on Science and Technology

and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School. Dan presents bold ideas of what we need to do

to address the inevitability of climate change as well as mediated. Our in-depth discussion will inform anyone interested in the complex political and scientific

challenges we need to deal with to move beyond our current crisis to a more sustainable world.

Patreon subscribers can find the full video of all of our programs as soon as are released at patreon.com slash origins podcast.

I hope you enjoy the show.

Well, Dan, it's good to be with you again, as always, here in your layer, as it turns out.

There are so many things I want to talk to you about. Every time I'm with you, I learn something useful about the climate and the earth. Let me ask you, I want to start with your origin, though. I want to start,

what was it about geophysics, geoscience that got you that made you do that rather than something else? You know, it actually took a long time to answer that question for myself. Yeah, good. Well, you can take as long as you want to answer it here, too.

I was an undergraduate at Yale, and I'd always done science as a kid. In high school, I actually

spent four summers working in a laboratory of a neuroendocrinologist. My first paper is written about the

angiotensin and the hypothalamus of the Brattleboro Rat. So doing biomedical research, and I think

everybody expected me to go to medical school. And I think that was just about the time where all my

hormones said that I had to rebel. And so I did something different. And I think I had this

idea that I would become a physicist. And I took a course my freshman year at Yale that was above the

course that was normally offered for physics concentrators at Yale. This was a course for people with

...