4.7 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 November 2025
⏱️ 15 minutes
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| 0:42.2 | Okay, on to the show. |
| 0:44.0 | You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. |
| 0:57.9 | Around 20,000 years ago, the world was cold. |
| 1:02.3 | Temperatures around the world averaged 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than they are today. |
| 1:05.1 | And most of North America was covered in ice. |
| 1:09.7 | Humans were surviving, though, mastering fire and making friends with wolves. |
| 1:16.6 | There's places where the ice is a kilometer thick sitting on top of North America, the northern U.S. and Canada. |
| 1:20.4 | That's Frankie Pavia, a geochemist at the University of Washington. |
| 1:26.9 | He says because the Earth's climate was so different during that time, the winds and oceans move differently than they do now. |
| 1:32.3 | And the sort of background state of Earth's climate, right, is just different as a result, both of these changes to the Earth's surface and, right, because there's a hundred parts |
| 1:37.3 | per million less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during this time. |
| 1:41.3 | But in the couple thousand years to follow, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and |
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