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slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to Scientific American Science Talk posted on January 19th,

2017. I'm Steve Murski. In mid-December, Scientific American

Executive Editor Fred Gutierrell had a chance to sit down with President Obama's science

advisor, John Holdren, who's about to leave office. They had a far-ranging conversation that

covered climate science, space travel, the issue of reproducibility in science,

the Brain Initiative, and more.

The 32 minutes that follow is an edited version of their discussion.

Let's talk about climate.

You gave an interview with my colleagues at Nature magazine in July,

and you were saying that you were pretty

optimistic that climate regulations that you've put in place would stay in place. Are you still

optimistic? Well, what I'm most optimistic about in the climate domain is that I think the progress that we're making in the United States and around the world is being driven by two fundamental forces that are actually independent of government policy.

And one of those forces is the growing evidence of damage from climate change that people

are experiencing all around the world. That is, there are more longer and more intense heat waves,

more longer and more intense droughts, more torrential downpours and associated flooding,

coastal erosion from sea level rise, wildfires increasing in annual

area burned in the far north, even the tundra is now burning, which never did before.

...