Oceans And Climate, Quantum Mechanics. Sept 27, 2019, Part 1

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🗓️ 27 September 2019

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A new report issued this week by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change paints a troubling picture of the world’s ice and oceans. The ocean effects of climate change, from warming waters to ocean acidification to sea level rise, are already altering the weather, fisheries, and coastal communities. The authors of the report state that the ocean has already taken up more than 90% of the excess heat in the climate system since 1970, the surface is becoming more acidic, and oxygen is being depleted in the top thousand meters of the water column. All those conditions are projected to get worse in the years ahead. Ocean scientist and former NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco joins Ira to talk about the risks to the ocean, its effects on the global ecosystem, and how the ocean can also help to blunt some of the worst climate outcomes—if action is taken now. In his new book, Something Deeply Hidden, quantum physicist Sean Carroll offers a different ending for Schrödinger’s imaginary cat. Carroll ascribes to the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, originally proposed by American physicist Hugh Everett in the 1950’s. According to Everett, when you look inside the box you are also in two states at once. Now there are two worlds—one in which you saw the cat alive, and one in which you saw the cat dead. If thinking about this makes your head hurt, you’re not alone. Carroll joins Ira to talk about the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, and why he thinks not enough physicists are taking on the challenge of trying to understand it. Plus: World leaders convened in New York City this week for the United Nations Climate Action Summit. But there wasn’t a whole lot of action at the Climate Action Summit, at least not from the greenhouse-gas-emitting elephants in the room: India, China, and the United States. Umair Irfan, who writes about energy, tech and climate for Vox.com, catches Ira up on how countries around the world are tackling—or ignoring—the climate crisis. And Sarah Zhang, staff writer at the Atlantic, tells Ira about NASA's new infrared telescope to detect near-Earth objects and other science headlines in this week's News Roundup.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.
0:02.9	Later in the hour, an update on this week's UN Climate Summit and a red flag about the health of the oceans.
0:10.0	But first, in July, an asteroid, the size of a football field, whizzed by the Earth, and it was close.
0:18.3	Just a fifth the distance from the Earth to the moon.
0:21.7	There's a nickname for asteroids that size, city killers.
0:25.9	But the most important detail about this space rock called 2019 OK
0:30.3	is that no one knew it was coming.
0:34.0	It was a complete surprise to astronomers until just a day before it's flyby. And it was a wake-up
0:40.4	call that we might need to keep a more watchful eye on the skies. Now NASA has announced a new
0:46.2	telescope to do just that. Here with the details on that and other selected short subjects in
0:51.5	science is Sarah Zang, staff writer at the Atlantic in Washington.
0:55.6	Welcome back to Science Friday, Sarah. Hi, Ira. Nice to be here. Nice to have you. Okay, tell us about
1:00.4	what, what is this new telescope? Yeah, so NASA announced we're going to go ahead with this
1:04.7	telescope called the Near Earth Object surveillance mission, a near-Earth object being a fancy
1:09.6	term for asteroids that might kill us one day if they
1:12.4	got too close to us.
1:13.9	So the reason that, as you were saying, we missed this asteroid that came by so close is we
1:18.7	are largely relying on ground-based telescopes.
1:20.6	Obviously, on the ground, you might be foiled by things as, you know, as common as clouds.
1:25.6	And you just can't see as well into space. And asteroids are really hard to see because, one, they're particularly small, and they're very dark since they don't give off any light of their own. So we're really relying on light that's being reflected off of them. So the point of this telescope is that's going to look for infrared, which is really good at looking at dark objects. And the idea is to catalog all of these quote-ununquote, near-earth objects, and try to figure out what their trajectories are and if they are going to come close to Earth. So hopefully we have more than 24 hours. Well, this big rock that just flew by this summer, would it actually have been detected by this new telescope? Yeah, that's the idea.
2:04.6	Yeah, it wasn't too small for the new telescope to see.
2:06.6	No, a football-sized asteroid is pretty big.
	...

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