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Weather Gone Wild with Bernadette Woods Placky · Simmer Down

• 0:00
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Don't wait for someone else to do something.
• 0:03
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Take it upon yourself because we're gonna need to keep advancing things in this world.
• 0:06
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Climate, obviously, being the biggest one that we focus on, and I I do think is our biggest challenge, because a lot of our other challenges are connected to climate change.
• 0:15
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But there's a lot of challenges too, and we can't wait for someone else to do things.
• 0:19
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We need to jump in and do them ourselves, whether it's big or small.
• 0:22
  Bernadette Woods Placky: I mean, you don't have to start a podcast.
• 0:24
  Bernadette Woods Placky: You don't have to start an organization.
• 0:25
  Bernadette Woods Placky: There's a lot you can do and just have conversations with people about climate change.
• 0:32
  Kathleen Biggins: Welcome to Simmer Down, a cool-headed look at a hot topic, climate change.
• 0:38
  Kathleen Biggins: Climate change is impacting so many areas of our lives, but especially the kitchen table issues, the things we talk about and care about every single day.
• 0:48
  Kathleen Biggins: From the safety of our families to the protection of our homes and investments, to our ability to be outside to enjoy the things that we love.
• 0:57
  Kathleen Biggins: Because we want to delve into kitchen table issues, we're sitting down at a real kitchen table in my kitchen and talking to experts about how climate change is impacting our lives.
• 1:10
  Kathleen Biggins: Today we're going to focus on weather weirding.
• 1:13
  Kathleen Biggins: The absolutely strange weather patterns we're seeing all across the globe and reflected on our TV sets and computers every single day.
• 1:24
  Kathleen Biggins: The weather experiences we're seeing not just in our own neighborhoods, but really all across the globe.
• 1:30
  Kathleen Biggins: To unpack that, we invited a world-renowned expert, Bernadette Woods Placky.
• 1:36
  Kathleen Biggins: Bernadette is an Emmy-winning meteorologist and climate expert with more than 25 years of experience translating complex science into stories that move people and inspire institutions to act.
• 1:49
  Kathleen Biggins: She most recently served as Vice President of Engagement and Chief Meteorologist at Climate Central, where she built and led Climate Matters, an innovative climate journalism and communication program.
• 2:02
  Kathleen Biggins: Welcome, Bernadette.
• 2:03
  Kathleen Biggins: We are so thrilled to have this opportunity to speak with you.
• 2:07
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Well, thank you for having me today.
• 2:08
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's always fun to sit down and chat climate with you.
• 2:12
  Kathleen Biggins: I wanted to focus in on your expertise of weather, because I think weather is really something that for many of us is hard to think about in big terms.
• 2:23
  Kathleen Biggins: For most of us, the weather is just what it is right now outside, right?
• 2:27
  Kathleen Biggins: Even packing for a different climate is hard.
• 2:30
  Kathleen Biggins: And yet, when we think about climate, we're talking about weather writ large.
• 2:35
  Kathleen Biggins: We're talking about it on a global scale.
• 2:38
  Kathleen Biggins: But I recently read something that kind of helped me focus on how big it is.
• 2:42
  Kathleen Biggins: It was a report from the World Economic Forum that said that in general, every year we spend over $143 billion on natural disasters, which translates to $16 million every single hour.
• 2:58
  Kathleen Biggins: That number just floored me.
• 3:01
  Kathleen Biggins: And it helped me realize that my own perceptions are a bit skewed by what's happening right now, right here.
• 3:07
  Kathleen Biggins: So can you help us understand why the weather is changing so much and how climate, which is the big picture, is different from weather?
• 3:16
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So I do skirt this myself, and I'll tell you why.
• 3:19
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But weather is what you're experiencing where you are in that moment.
• 3:24
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Climate is that weather over space and time.
• 3:27
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Your personality is the climate, your mood is the weather.
• 3:32
  Bernadette Woods Placky: You're gonna get shifts all the time within whatever climate you have.
• 3:37
  Bernadette Woods Placky: That's weather.
• 3:38
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's gonna go up, it's gonna go down, it's gonna be hot, it's gonna be cold.
• 3:41
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Climate is that over time.
• 3:44
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But what we're doing now is we have fundamentally shifted our climate to the point that it has shifted our weather.
• 3:52
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And this is why I'm happy to answer the differences scientifically, but they are very tied at this point because our current weather has been changed because of climate change.
• 4:05
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But the idea, really, to summarize on the big scale is think about our globe.
• 4:11
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It has this thin layer around it.
• 4:13
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's like a blanket.
• 4:14
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Those are our greenhouse gases.
• 4:16
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And we know what greenhouse gases are.
• 4:19
  Bernadette Woods Placky: They trap heat.
• 4:20
  Bernadette Woods Placky: This is science that goes back to the 1800s, right?
• 4:23
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But we also know and we can measure that we are adding more of those to our atmosphere.
• 4:27
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So that really thin little layer is trapping all this heat.
• 4:32
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And it's acting like a boiling pot of water.
• 4:35
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So things are getting more turbulent, they're shaking up, and where that plays out and how that plays out really varies from place to place and types of weather.
• 4:43
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But that's the real summary is we've got this blanket, we're making it thicker, and because of that, it's making our weather more turbulent.
• 4:52
  Kathleen Biggins: And I understand that we actually have a discipline of science called atmospheric chemistry that enables us to discern which molecules are of greenhouse gases come from human activities, from burning fossil fuels.
• 5:06
  Kathleen Biggins: And therefore, we know we are the ones driving the change.
• 5:09
  Kathleen Biggins: Is that right?
• 5:10
  Bernadette Woods Placky: This is absolutely true.
• 5:11
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So when you get into atmospheric chemistry, we look at the different types of greenhouse gases.
• 5:16
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And then within those greenhouse gases, you can get even deeper.
• 5:19
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We'll focus on two: carbon dioxide and methane.
• 5:22
  Bernadette Woods Placky: They're the two biggest ones that we talk about when we talk about climate change in general, because carbon dioxide stays in our atmosphere for a really long time.
• 5:32
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It breaks down over time, but some version of it for hundreds of years, and you can get into a specific type of carbon, C12, C14, there are different numbers to that.
• 5:42
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Okay, you're going into professional grade here.
• 5:44
  Bernadette Woods Placky: That's how we can tell the fossil fuel connection.
• 5:47
  Kathleen Biggins: Right.
• 5:47
  Kathleen Biggins: Okay.
• 5:48
  Kathleen Biggins: So since we know that putting up greenhouse gases is changing our atmosphere's composition, and that in turn is making things hotter.
• 5:57
  Kathleen Biggins: What are the weather consequences of that?
• 6:01
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Yes.
• 6:01
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So getting back to the weather part of this, that's what's changing our weather because we're changing our atmosphere.
• 6:06
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We're making it hotter.
• 6:08
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Different types of weather play out differently.
• 6:11
  Bernadette Woods Placky: The first, most obvious one is more heat leads to more heat.
• 6:16
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We get more record heat.
• 6:18
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It lasts longer, it's pushing to new levels.
• 6:21
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Our summertime heat is creeping into the spring and into the fall.
• 6:25
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's thawing out our winters and it's playing out in many different ways.
• 6:28
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But that's the first one is more heat equals more heat.
• 6:31
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Got it.
• 6:32
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Then we can get on to how it's changing our water cycle.
• 6:35
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And this can get a little confusing at times because we are getting both more heavy rain and more intense drought at the same time.
• 6:42
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that can be confusing, right?
• 6:44
  Bernadette Woods Placky: How can it get wetter and how can it get drier?
• 6:46
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But this is how that plays out scientifically.
• 6:49
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Come back to that atmosphere, right?
• 6:52
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Our globe is mainly water.
• 6:54
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We sometimes forget that when we're on land, but over 70% of our globe is water.
• 6:58
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And when you create a hotter atmosphere, it's forcing more evaporation.
• 7:03
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So there's more water molecules in that atmosphere.
• 7:06
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Now they don't always come down.
• 7:08
  Bernadette Woods Placky: If they don't come down, what it's doing on that drought side is it's intensifying that drought more rapidly.
• 7:14
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's more, think of a thirstier atmosphere, right?
• 7:17
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's pulling more moisture out of the ground quicker because it's hotter.
• 7:20
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It dries out quicker.
• 7:22
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Now, on the opposite side, when we do get a trigger for that rain to come down, whether it's a tropical system, a front, a snowstorm, whatever it may be, we have more moisture available.
• 7:33
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So it's coming down in bigger buckets.
• 7:35
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that's how you get both drought and heavy rain at the same time.
• 7:40
  Kathleen Biggins: You know that I grew up in New Orleans, so I know a lot about being overwhelmed by rain and water.
• 7:46
  Kathleen Biggins: But honestly, it seems like it's happening everywhere.
• 7:50
  Kathleen Biggins: Every time I turn on my TV, somewhere in the world is experiencing a devastating flood, a hundred-year flood or a 500-year flood, even in places that we don't think of as being flood prone.
• 8:02
  Kathleen Biggins: Are they indeed happening that much more frequently?
• 8:05
  Bernadette Woods Placky: They are.
• 8:05
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So there's a few ways that we're going to break this down because one, they are happening more frequently.
• 8:10
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But at the same time, we're also there's more people and more infrastructure in our way of where these floods are happening.
• 8:18
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that infrastructure was built for a different time.
• 8:21
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So when you have more rain to come down and there is something to trigger that rainfall amount, it's coming down one, two, three plus inches an hour.
• 8:31
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that might not sound like a lot, but that is a lot in certain parts of the country.
• 8:36
  Bernadette Woods Placky: New Orleans, it is still a lot, but it might not quite be the same as that is farther north in certain cities.
• 8:42
  Bernadette Woods Placky: A regular Sunday in New Orleans, probably.
• 8:44
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Yes.
• 8:45
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So yes, we are getting more of these, and we're getting them everywhere.
• 8:48
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Even the places that are getting drier overall, like the southwestern part of our country, when we get the rain, there's more of it coming down.
• 8:56
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So it's a it's a different relationship with rainfall that we're experiencing too.
• 9:00
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And the other thing to think about is we're still warming our atmosphere.
• 9:04
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So those amounts are growing and they're only going to get higher until we do something to stabilize this climate.
• 9:10
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Right.
• 9:10
  Kathleen Biggins: Which means we're going to have to build more infrastructure, spend more money to prepare, harden our homes.
• 9:15
  Kathleen Biggins: And it's almost like we're trying to catch up to a foe that's running a lot faster because nature is changing so fast.
• 9:23
  Kathleen Biggins: What are some of the other worrisome weather events that you're seeing being caused by climate change?
• 9:29
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So we'll stay on the dry side first.
• 9:31
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that doesn't mean climate change is causing more wildfires, but what it's doing is setting the stage for bigger, more explosive fires.
• 9:40
  Bernadette Woods Placky: When you have drier land, you combine that with more heat.
• 9:45
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Those are two of the ingredients for what we call a fire weather day.
• 9:49
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Another is the wind.
• 9:50
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So when you have those three pieces together: dry, hot, and windy, that sets the stage for if something were to ignite, it can explode.
• 9:59
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Right.
• 10:00
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And it can go really fast and really far.
• 10:02
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And we're seeing that across our country, not just across the West.
• 10:06
  Bernadette Woods Placky: I mean, that's the really documented one, but across Florida, across New Jersey, where we live.
• 10:11
  Bernadette Woods Placky: This is this is really happening everywhere.
• 10:13
  Kathleen Biggins: I may ask a silly question here, but if things are burning so much, once they're burnt, can they burn again in the near future?
• 10:23
  Kathleen Biggins: Or are they kind of are we done with that danger in that area?
• 10:26
  Kathleen Biggins: Or is it something we have to revisit every decade or so?
• 10:30
  Bernadette Woods Placky: There is regrowth afterwards.
• 10:33
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And also there is a lot of land out west that is exposed to this and and across the east too.
• 10:40
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So if one section burns often that may be a little protective for a couple of years next to it, though, might not be.
• 10:49
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And then that area might be more susceptible.
• 10:51
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So it gets a little complex, but there's a lot of land that can burn.
• 10:55
  Kathleen Biggins: And there's a lot of land in Florida and in Georgia that were already burning just this season.
• 11:00
  Kathleen Biggins: And so we're seeing it, as you said, in many more places.
• 11:04
  Kathleen Biggins: I live in New Jersey in a suburban area.
• 11:06
  Kathleen Biggins: And when I look at climate risk to my own home coming forward, wildfire risk, which is nowhere on the radar at this point, is actually one of the major risks to my home in the future, which really knocked my socks off again because it's just not something I think about.
• 11:22
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that's what's so fascinating, is it's not just a Western issue.
• 11:25
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And it's not even just that the smoke from the Western wildfires moves east.
• 11:29
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's we live in a part of New Jersey where we do have a lot of conserved land that is absolutely beautiful.
• 11:34
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And we've seen some of these wildfires take hold the past couple of years and they can move pretty rapidly in a warming atmosphere.
• 11:42
  Kathleen Biggins: What about cold?
• 11:44
  Kathleen Biggins: It still seems like we're getting a lot of really big cold spells, or the polar vortex is coming deeply down to the south.
• 11:51
  Kathleen Biggins: Is that linked in any way to climate change?
• 11:56
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So overall, we are not getting more cold.
• 11:59
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Our source regions where that cold air comes from are also warming up.
• 12:03
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Meaning the Arctic or the The Arctic is warming up.
• 12:06
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So it's not as cold as it used to be, even when it does come south.
• 12:09
  Bernadette Woods Placky: That doesn't mean it's not cold.
• 12:11
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So but the thing is, we're we're talking about perspective here.
• 12:14
  Bernadette Woods Placky: If it was a minus 40 and it's a minus 20, that's still really cold, but it's not as cold.
• 12:18
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So just keep that in perspective.
• 12:20
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But overall, we are not getting more cold.
• 12:23
  Bernadette Woods Placky: There's a few different analysis we had done while I was at Climate Central that looks at the coldest cold over the course of 30, 40, 50 years, right?
• 12:31
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So what would have been a minus 20 something in parts of Minnesota or pushing a minus 30 might now be coming in at a minus 15.
• 12:40
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Again, cold, but not as cold.
• 12:43
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So overall, it's just not happening as much.
• 12:47
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's big news when it happens, because it doesn't happen as much.
• 12:52
  Bernadette Woods Placky: As we keep creeping up with temperatures, we're getting used to a warmer winter.
• 12:57
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And when we get a snapshot of what it used to be, it feels really extraordinary.
• 13:02
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Even this past winter, a few of the really cold outbreaks.
• 13:06
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So again, we're recording this in 2026.
• 13:09
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So some of the winter of 2025 into early 2026 was really cold for parts of the country.
• 13:15
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But there were only a handful of record colds.
• 13:18
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Now there were records that definitely happened.
• 13:20
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But at the same time, the western part of our country was breaking record high after record high after record high.
• 13:27
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So that's another way you can look at this.
• 13:29
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's cold, it's just not as cold.
• 13:31
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's not breaking as many records.
• 13:32
  Bernadette Woods Placky: The area that it's coming from is not as cold.
• 13:34
  Bernadette Woods Placky: At the same time, on the opposite side, it's still pushing the heat.
• 13:38
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Heat, heat, heat, heat.
• 13:40
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So there's that.
• 13:41
  Bernadette Woods Placky: If you like science and research and some really fun science going on right now of how our jet stream, which moves our storms along way up where the airplanes fly, how that's changing with climate change.
• 13:56
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And if our jet stream changes, it's going to set up our storm patterns differently.
• 14:00
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And with Arctic amplification, so so hang with me here, everybody.
• 14:05
  Bernadette Woods Placky: You've got the equator, right?
• 14:07
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Yeah.
• 14:08
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Warmer.
• 14:08
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Yep.
• 14:09
  Bernadette Woods Placky: You've got the poles colder.
• 14:11
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And if the Arctic is warming faster than the equator, the difference in temperature isn't as extreme.
• 14:20
  Kathleen Biggins: That makes sense.
• 14:21
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's that difference in temperature that drives our jet stream.
• 14:24
  Bernadette Woods Placky: If it's not as extreme, it can slow down that jet stream and it can get wavier.
• 14:29
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And think of a river or a stream.
• 14:31
  Bernadette Woods Placky: When a river's going really fast, it can stay on a track.
• 14:34
  Bernadette Woods Placky: When it starts to lose that water, it gets really windy.
• 14:39
  Bernadette Woods Placky: That's what the research is looking at.
• 14:41
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Is that happening with our jet stream right now as things are changing?
• 14:45
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So if that's the case and it gets really windy, when it dips low, it's gonna bring some of that colder air from the poles our way.
• 14:55
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And it's gonna stay in place for longer.
• 14:58
  Bernadette Woods Placky: That's the other thing.
• 14:59
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It gets really stuck, just like that stream would get really stuck when it starts to get windy.
• 15:04
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So that's one of the things that's the overall pattern and how that is.
• 15:07
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So that's talking about the cold again.
• 15:09
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Winter weather, though, let's come back to the rainfall.
• 15:14
  Bernadette Woods Placky: If it's still below 32 degrees, that extra precipitation will fall the snow.
• 15:19
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And there's a lot of parts of our country that's still going to happen.
• 15:22
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's just if you've got more moisture and you've got a temperature below the 32, that more moisture comes down as more snow.
• 15:30
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So that is another tricky one to process sometimes, right?
• 15:33
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But think about high mountains or high north latitudes.
• 15:37
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's still significantly below 32 for a lot of these events.
• 15:40
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So the extra precipitation is coming down as more snow.
• 15:44
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So that is the connection with more winter weather.
• 15:48
  Kathleen Biggins: Okay, so you talked about timing.
• 15:51
  Kathleen Biggins: Um, and I think that triggers something that that has come forward a lot more recently, is that even though we're having heat and cold, they're kind of getting shuffled together.
• 16:01
  Kathleen Biggins: I mean, like in spring, we might have a beautiful day that causes our spring flowers to bloom, and then hello, winter's still here and they get creamed.
• 16:10
  Kathleen Biggins: And if you're a fruit crop or something like that, it can really harm the yields later in the season.
• 16:15
  Kathleen Biggins: And it's also hard for us to figure it out.
• 16:17
  Kathleen Biggins: We get whiplash, right?
• 16:18
  Kathleen Biggins: It's cold, it's hot, it's cold, it's hot.
• 16:20
  Kathleen Biggins: Is that also uh the face of climate change?
• 16:24
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Well, we've always had shifts in spring and fall.
• 16:28
  Bernadette Woods Placky: These are really our transition seasons anyway.
• 16:30
  Bernadette Woods Placky: If you go back over time, it's gonna be hot, cold, hot, cold.
• 16:33
  Bernadette Woods Placky: You'll see that in the records for sure.
• 16:35
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We're pushing the levels during these times.
• 16:40
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And so what would have been traditionally still a last freeze date for some of our locations is at risk now because we're we're pushing our warmth earlier and things are blooming earlier.
• 16:52
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And they're putting them at risk for if we get what would have been a normal cold front to come through, suddenly everything's at bloom.
• 16:59
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's at risk.
• 17:00
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that's what we're seeing of.
• 17:01
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that has happened more, definitely with climate change.
• 17:04
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We got it this year in New Jersey.
• 17:07
  Bernadette Woods Placky: I know it's been a big issue for a lot of our fruit in New Jersey.
• 17:10
  Bernadette Woods Placky: There was a few years ago, there was a really significant event in Georgia and South Carolina that took out so many peaches, rose to the level of a billion-dollar disaster event because it took so much of the peach crop out.
• 17:23
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And the cold front during that time, it wasn't anything extraordinarily later.
• 17:29
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It was that it gotten so warm so much earlier to put the crops at risk.
• 17:35
  Kathleen Biggins: Right.
• 17:35
  Kathleen Biggins: So it's kind of the we're changing the the old cycles of nature in some ways, right?
• 17:40
  Kathleen Biggins: I mean, because I'm reading too that when that changes, then things like migrating birds don't necessarily have the food they need at the time period that they need it.
• 17:49
  Kathleen Biggins: And so it's almost like when I use the word shuffle, it just kind of really resonates in my mind.
• 17:54
  Kathleen Biggins: It's like something that had been kind of neat is now getting all mixed up.
• 17:58
  Bernadette Woods Placky: There are some people that use global weirding, that they use chaos.
• 18:01
  Bernadette Woods Placky: There, there's, you know, different ways you can the climate challenge.
• 18:05
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's we talk about the extremes when it comes to weather because they are significant and they are the events that take our lives, as we were talking about, livelihoods.
• 18:12
  Bernadette Woods Placky: They really smack you across the face and force you to look at something differently if your home's washed away.
• 18:18
  Bernadette Woods Placky: At the same time, though, it's those everyday changes that are happening also, and that mistiming really is a factor and it's playing out in these crops.
• 18:28
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And it is playing out with pollinators and when they come or when birds do migrate, and we are seeing that.
• 18:34
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And it is a big risk, too.
• 18:37
  Kathleen Biggins: It just seems like the costs that are coming to again prepare for the new normals of nature, and also the costs that we're experiencing as taxpayers to repair from all of the damage that's happening all around us is just getting too big to ignore.
• 18:54
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's costing more not to do something at this point than to do something.
• 18:57
  Bernadette Woods Placky: That's where we are.
• 18:58
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And even to update some of the language we use, there's a lot of people that call them unnatural disasters now.
• 19:03
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And even the new normal, the changing normal, because we haven't plateaued.
• 19:08
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Right.
• 19:08
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We haven't settled.
• 19:09
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It is still changing, and it will continue to until we get a handle on things.
• 19:14
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So, yes, we are at a point.
• 19:16
  Kathleen Biggins: Get a handle on things, meaning lower emissions?
• 19:18
  Kathleen Biggins: Yes.
• 19:19
  Kathleen Biggins: Okay.
• 19:20
  Kathleen Biggins: And if we lower emissions, how quickly would that have an impact on lowering our risk?
• 19:27
  Kathleen Biggins: Is that something that we could expect within a generation or something that we're doing for future generations?
• 19:32
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We are still increasing the amount of emissions that we are putting into our atmosphere.
• 19:36
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And again, just to remind people where those come from, it's mainly the burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil, and gas.
• 19:43
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Our biggest emitter sector in the United States is transportation.
• 19:48
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We drive really big things far.
• 19:50
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We have a big country.
• 19:51
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It is complicated.
• 19:53
  Bernadette Woods Placky: At the same time, our energy systems and both transportation and energy systems, we have some really great solutions that are already up and running, right?
• 20:04
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Then you play into how we treat our land, our farming system.
• 20:08
  Bernadette Woods Placky: That also factors in.
• 20:09
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's if we keep letting this temperature rise, it's not a linear thing.
• 20:14
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's with each tenth of a degree, a lot more starts to break down.
• 20:20
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Think of your body in a temperature in 98 degrees when you're pushing to 100.
• 20:25
  Bernadette Woods Placky: You can still function with certain things.
• 20:27
  Bernadette Woods Placky: You're not feeling well, but by 101, 102, 103, a lot just starts to break down and compound within that.
• 20:34
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that's our earth.
• 20:35
  Bernadette Woods Placky: That's what's happening to our earth.
• 20:37
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So we, if we can stabilize, even without dropping, if we can stabilize, we can protect a lot of what we have still.
• 20:46
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that's really critical because this isn't just a, we have to keep thinking about this.
• 20:51
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We are still accelerating, we are still increasing.
• 20:54
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So a lot of these changes can even help us stabilize so that we can build a healthier, safer society that we know how to do and we know will be better for everyone.
• 21:03
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that is where there's a lot of hope.
• 21:13
  Kathleen Biggins: More when we return after this break.
• 21:16
  Kathleen Biggins: One of the things that we read about quite a lot are these tipping points, things that when they happen cannot be turned back to the way they were within human time frames.
• 22:50
  Kathleen Biggins: How seriously should we take tipping points?
• 22:53
  Kathleen Biggins: Or what are the ones that you are most concerned about?
• 22:56
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Tipping points are fascinating because their risk is so they're frightening.
• 22:59
  Bernadette Woods Placky: They're not fascinating.
• 23:01
  Bernadette Woods Placky: They are frightening, they are.
• 23:02
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Scientifically, they're fascinating because the risk is so small, but the impact is grandiose, right?
• 23:11
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It is life-changing.
• 23:12
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And the big ones that people are looking at right now, the AMOC.
• 23:17
  Bernadette Woods Placky: I know you and I have talked about that.
• 23:18
  Bernadette Woods Placky: That's the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.
• 23:24
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So we'll just say AMOC, right?
• 23:26
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But what it is is really that current.
• 23:28
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's a whole loop that starts down in off of Florida, makes its way with the Gulf Stream, brings the warmer water up toward Canada and the northern part of the Atlantic, and then up into the northern part of Europe.
• 23:45
  Bernadette Woods Placky: This is where a picture is better, right?
• 23:46
  Bernadette Woods Placky: I'm trying to it comes up and it and it transports that warmer water up.
• 23:51
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Then it overturns.
• 23:53
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And then it forces the colder water down, brings it back down.
• 23:57
  Bernadette Woods Placky: There's a lot of benefits, right?
• 23:59
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It to our marine life, to salinity.
• 24:01
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It keeps things balanced overall.
• 24:03
  Bernadette Woods Placky: There is some crazy research if we're hitting some tipping points with that.
• 24:07
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And if we were to hit a tipping point with AMOC, the circulation's going to slow down, slow down to a point that it won't transport as much warm water north.
• 24:18
  Bernadette Woods Placky: That would actually chill parts of northern Europe.
• 24:23
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Not the kind of cooling you want, right?
• 24:25
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So, like this is like you have to really be careful with this because it's it may counter some of the overall warming that's going on, but it's it's not what we want because it will dramatically affect marine life.
• 24:36
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We will see an incredible sea level rise along the east coast of the United States, and salinity levels will be way out of whack.
• 24:44
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And so it's it's not something we want.
• 24:47
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that is possibly at risk.
• 24:49
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Now, is it going to happen or not?
• 24:50
  Bernadette Woods Placky: I do not know.
• 24:51
  Bernadette Woods Placky: There, there are new research papers coming out that are showing it's closer and closer, but again, very active research right now.
• 24:58
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We we do not know at this point, but we need to keep paying attention because if that does slow down to that level, life changes for a whole lot of people.
• 25:06
  Kathleen Biggins: On much of the planet, because it's also rains across Africa.
• 25:10
  Kathleen Biggins: It's it's it really has impacts that are so far reaching that it is concerning.
• 25:15
  Kathleen Biggins: And it has overturned in not too distant history, right?
• 25:19
  Kathleen Biggins: So this is something that happens.
• 25:20
  Kathleen Biggins: And if we're precipitating it at a time when there's so many of us on this planet and so many people be impacted, it's it's a big deal.
• 25:28
  Kathleen Biggins: But let's talk about some of the other tipping points.
• 25:30
  Kathleen Biggins: Uh let's talk about the melting permafrost because that's something we're seeing in real time.
• 25:35
  Kathleen Biggins: Some of the rivers out in Alaska are turning orange because the permafrost is melting and different minerals are leaching into them.
• 25:42
  Kathleen Biggins: Is that something that concerns you because it it's putting up so much methane and so much carbon dioxide?
• 25:49
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Permafrost is the frozen land that we just sort of assume will always be frozen across our poles.
• 25:57
  Bernadette Woods Placky: The thing is, as we warm, some of that's thawing.
• 26:00
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And there's a lot that gets banked in what has become frozen because ice takes snapshots of what's in the air at different times and compacts them and brings them down.
• 26:12
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And so there are things like methane and other levels that are banked into the permafrost right now that if it melts, that gets released.
• 26:20
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And methane is a really strong greenhouse gas, so it will accelerate our warming.
• 26:24
  Bernadette Woods Placky: That's one thing.
• 26:25
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So, yes, that is a major concern.
• 26:27
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Two, permafrost in the frozen world in general, right, is white and light.
• 26:33
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And so when you look at our whole climate system, sunlight reflects off of white and darker colors, it absorbs.
• 26:44
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And so when this melts, the land gets darker because of what's underneath the frozen tundra there.
• 26:51
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And then it starts absorbing more heat too, again, increasing the amount of warming.
• 26:56
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And then a lot of, again, the way we've built society is based on what was frozen.
• 27:02
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So a lot of our native people across some of these frozen tundras still have an element of nomadic life to them that is living off the land and certain types of animals that come at certain types of year that they're used to coming, or how they fish or where they fish.
• 27:19
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But the more that melts, you're not going to see as many of those animals in some of those places because they are not just walking across the frozen land.
• 27:27
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It may either be thawed out land or it might be water, right?
• 27:32
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Because that's a part of it too.
• 27:33
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So it's a little different than permafrost, but it's ice.
• 27:35
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And then also if that happens along the coasts, it exposes the coastlines more.
• 27:39
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And what, and when you combine that with the ice part that's melting over the waters, you're getting some bigger seas that are leading to more coastal erosion.
• 27:47
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And we've already seen some communities across Alaska have to relocate.
• 27:51
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Well, when we see in Alaska, we also see it in Louisiana.
• 27:54
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It is so complicated.
• 27:55
  Bernadette Woods Placky: The politics, the land rights, the who gets what, to have to move your home.
• 28:01
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's emotional.
• 28:02
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It it's really messy.
• 28:04
  Kathleen Biggins: But you raise a very good point, though, because sea level is rising.
• 28:08
  Kathleen Biggins: It is changing our coastline.
• 28:10
  Kathleen Biggins: I saw some pictures of Florida back during the last glacial period.
• 28:15
  Kathleen Biggins: And it was so fat.
• 28:16
  Kathleen Biggins: It was just a big, fat state, and that's because so much of the Earth's water was up on ice.
• 28:23
  Kathleen Biggins: And then you see a picture of um Florida back when the temperatures were as high as they are today, and it's this little nubbin.
• 28:30
  Kathleen Biggins: It's so tiny, it doesn't even look close to being the state of Florida.
• 28:34
  Kathleen Biggins: And I think so many of us, just like we say, weather is what's outside our door right now, we think the sea level has always been here and always will be.
• 28:44
  Kathleen Biggins: But seeing those pictures of Florida just really made me realize what we have set into motion.
• 28:50
  Kathleen Biggins: And it's not just places like Louisiana and parts of Alaska, it's our major cities.
• 28:57
  Kathleen Biggins: It's London, it's Miami, it's New York City.
• 29:00
  Kathleen Biggins: They're all on the coastline.
• 29:02
  Kathleen Biggins: And so when we think of what we're setting to motion and the types of heartbreak and costs that are coming, it's just so much more than people realize.
• 29:11
  Bernadette Woods Placky: When there were the dramatic shifts in the past, yes, the climate has changed before.
• 29:15
  Bernadette Woods Placky: There have been big shifts.
• 29:16
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We have not had land set up and as mature and developed as we do now.
• 29:24
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We can't just move New York City.
• 29:26
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Right.
• 29:26
  Bernadette Woods Placky: I mean, it it's it's crazy.
• 29:29
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So in Indonesia, Jakarta, they're moving their capital right now.
• 29:32
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Right.
• 29:33
  Bernadette Woods Placky: This is wild to follow.
• 29:35
  Bernadette Woods Placky: I mean, some of it is our changing climate, but some of it is also they are sinking for several different reasons.
• 29:40
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So it's not fully a climate story, but climate is part of the story.
• 29:44
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And they are physically moving their capital.
• 29:47
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Right.
• 29:47
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Another part of weather that we didn't talk about yet is our tropical systems and hurricanes.
• 29:52
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Oh, yeah.
• 29:53
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Okay.
• 29:53
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And so when you get a storm combined with sea level rise, that water's coming higher, it's coming farther inland.
• 30:01
  Kathleen Biggins: I'm sure you saw the recent report that said New Orleans um will soon be uh just an island amongst a ring of water, and that they should consider starting to relocate the city of New Orleans in the next few decades, which of course broke my heart.
• 30:17
  Kathleen Biggins: But it is that one-two punch.
• 30:19
  Kathleen Biggins: It's it's when you have these hurricanes on top of the sea level rise that really causes the crisis in real time that makes us stand up and notice.
• 30:28
  Kathleen Biggins: So, how is climate change making hurricanes more dangerous or more expensive?
• 30:34
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So, a few different ways here, too.
• 30:35
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So you've got warmer water, right?
• 30:37
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And we talk about all the warming in our atmosphere, but over 90% of the extra heat in our climate system is going into our water.
• 30:44
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Over 90%.
• 30:45
  Bernadette Woods Placky: I mean, this is a really big number.
• 30:47
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Warmer water has more fuel to it.
• 30:50
  Bernadette Woods Placky: That's why we get hurricanes, tropical systems.
• 30:53
  Bernadette Woods Placky: If you live in other parts of the world, typhoons, different names to them, right?
• 30:57
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Cyclones.
• 30:58
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But they're the same concept.
• 30:59
  Bernadette Woods Placky: They come when the water's warm.
• 31:01
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So warm water gives the fuel for these storms.
• 31:04
  Bernadette Woods Placky: When you bump up those temperatures, it's more fuel.
• 31:08
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So that's one factor there.
• 31:10
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So you've got storms that are getting stronger.
• 31:14
  Bernadette Woods Placky: At the same time, they're getting stronger faster.
• 31:16
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And we call that rapid intensification.
• 31:18
  Bernadette Woods Placky: When you go to bed at night and it's a category one, you wake up as a category three or four.
• 31:23
  Bernadette Woods Placky: This is documented to be happening more often.
• 31:26
  Bernadette Woods Placky: There's a lot of risk with that, that's that's not good for many reasons.
• 31:30
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's a stronger storm.
• 31:31
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But two, if a storm's coming close to land and you're preparing for a category one evacuation, it is a vastly different thing than preparing for category three, category four with timing, with locations and who goes and when and what goes, right?
• 31:46
  Bernadette Woods Placky: You've lived it.
• 31:47
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So that is changing our risk and our preparation around it.
• 31:52
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And then when they make landfall, it's coming with more heavy rain that's overwhelming systems, and it's coming with a higher storm surge that's going farther inland.
• 32:03
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So we're seeing more rapid intensification, pushing to higher levels, heavier, more rainfall with these storms, and then a stronger, higher storm surge.
• 32:12
  Bernadette Woods Placky: What about wind?
• 32:13
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Wind is interesting because that's how we measure the categories of storms, is on pressure and wind.
• 32:18
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Right.
• 32:18
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It is really a wind scale.
• 32:21
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And when you talk about the Sappho-Simpson scale, there they're again in our scientific communities.
• 32:27
  Bernadette Woods Placky: I am on the side that we should revisit a scale somehow because it is purely based on wind.
• 32:32
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It does not account for the amount of rain.
• 32:35
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that is water is one of our deadliest factors in Land Fong.
• 32:39
  Kathleen Biggins: So you're talking about category one is this the Sapphire scale scale.
• 32:44
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So some people have said we need a category six.
• 32:46
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Do you believe that?
• 32:47
  Bernadette Woods Placky: The definition of a category four, I mean category five, excuse me, pretty much equates to devastation.
• 32:54
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So how do you go above devastation, right?
• 32:57
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But at the same time, then the way that the numbers are chunked 20, 20 plus miles per hour, it's going above what would be the next category.
• 33:06
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Like we're going there in the numbers.
• 33:08
  Kathleen Biggins: So the wind speeds are already into that next category.
• 33:11
  Kathleen Biggins: And we're just not calling it that yet because we don't have it on the scale.
• 33:16
  Kathleen Biggins: Things are getting past our norms.
• 33:19
  Kathleen Biggins: Things are getting above what we have, the tools to measure them with our historic way.
• 33:25
  Kathleen Biggins: How is science reacting to it?
• 33:28
  Kathleen Biggins: What are the new scientific inquiries, the ability to project better and the ability to help us understand the attribution between some of these events and climate change?
• 33:41
  Kathleen Biggins: How are we sharpening our tools to better understand how nature is changing?
• 33:46
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So, one of the tools you just you just tipped on is a branch of climate science called attribution science.
• 33:51
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And it's where we can physically go into a storm and assess the role of climate change within that event.
• 33:58
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And the way that's done scientifically has to do with observations, taking you back in time, and really pulling out the statistics and probabilities of the likelihood of this event happening, combined with modeling.
• 34:13
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And when you go into computer models, you can crank up the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you can crank it down, take it back to what we call pre-industrial levels in the earlier 1800s, and you play around with all of this.
• 34:27
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And then you package all of this data, all of this information together, and then you come out with how much stronger this storm might have been, or how much more likely it is for this storm to happen.
• 34:40
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And so you can really tease out the role of climate change within individual events and also temperatures too.
• 34:47
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So is it just storms or is it wildfires?
• 34:50
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Is it more so heat waves, like how how heat waves, yeah.
• 34:54
  Bernadette Woods Placky: I haven't seen a heat wave that wasn't made more likely because of climate change in a long time.
• 34:59
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We are at a point where you put in the heat, you're getting more heat.
• 35:02
  Bernadette Woods Placky: There is almost every time a fingerprint of climate change in this extreme heat that we're getting.
• 35:09
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And our temperature records go back the farthest of really most of our weather measurements that we have.
• 35:16
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So you can look at a longer period of time and we understand the complexities of heat, right?
• 35:22
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Whereas on the other end of that scale, tornadoes.
• 35:25
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Right.
• 35:25
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Our data record just doesn't go back as far with tornadoes.
• 35:28
  Bernadette Woods Placky: That doesn't mean we don't know anything.
• 35:30
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's just harder to tease out something on such a small scale on these different time frames.
• 35:35
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We're not going to see many attribution reports soon about tornadoes, but maybe, and we have seen like overall pattern setups.
• 35:43
  Kathleen Biggins: How rigorous then are the models that we have today?
• 35:46
  Kathleen Biggins: How good are they in understanding what's happening, but also in forecasting?
• 35:51
  Kathleen Biggins: Weather models, I mean, we continue to just get better and better and better.
• 35:54
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And this is one of the areas with AI, it'll be fascinating to watch because some of the AI models are doing better on certain elements of forecasting, but we can't just fully go to them yet.
• 36:07
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We're not, we're not at that point.
• 36:08
  Bernadette Woods Placky: You need to balance the current physically based models with the equations and the AI models, bringing in a lot of pattern recognition and other elements.
• 36:16
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So we're at a point where we need both, but we keep pushing that forward.
• 36:21
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And this is why we need real funding around this is we are getting really good at this, and we're getting better and better to the point that everyone's expectations are so high for every forecast because it has advanced so rapidly.
• 36:35
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And so if we can keep pushing that direction, we'll get even better with our weather forecasts.
• 36:40
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Now, on the climate models, it's like it is different.
• 36:42
  Bernadette Woods Placky: The past couple of years, it is advancing pretty rapidly.
• 36:45
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And that's again where with AI and computing power, we're gonna have more going forward if we continue to invest in this and we'll learn even more.
• 36:53
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And with each few years, there's a big assessment of our global circulation climate models.
• 37:01
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And it steps up, it steps up, it steps up, and they create a framework of how you can downscale to, like we're saying, different regions or different types of events and stuff like that, too.
• 37:12
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So it's amazing how much better they've gotten.
• 37:14
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But at this time, with rapid acceleration of technology, there's we could do a lot.
• 37:20
  Kathleen Biggins: That's that's so reaffirming of our possibility to kind of manage this.
• 37:24
  Kathleen Biggins: If we understand it, we can probably manage it.
• 37:27
  Kathleen Biggins: And that's what I so appreciate about what you do.
• 37:31
  Kathleen Biggins: So you have two young sons.
• 37:33
  Kathleen Biggins: No, high school already.
• 37:35
  Kathleen Biggins: I can't believe that.
• 37:36
  Kathleen Biggins: So clearly, your eye is on the future and what the world will be like for them when they grow up.
• 37:44
  Kathleen Biggins: What gives you hope that we will be able to provide to them a world that is as beautiful and as safe and as financially secure as the one we were given?
• 37:57
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's it's the impacts, but it's the solutions and it's what you can do.
• 38:01
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And I think it's bigger than climate in this sense.
• 38:04
  Bernadette Woods Placky: It's empowering our kids, one, to show them what we're doing and what other really dedicated people are doing in this world and expose them to that and try and help our kids understand they can do that too.
• 38:17
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Don't wait for someone else to do something.
• 38:19
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Take it upon yourself because we're gonna need to keep advancing things in this world.
• 38:22
  Bernadette Woods Placky: Climate, obviously, being the biggest one that we focus on, and I do think is our biggest challenge because a lot of our other challenges are connected to climate change.
• 38:32
  Bernadette Woods Placky: But there's a lot of challenges too, and we can't wait for someone else to do things.
• 38:36
  Bernadette Woods Placky: We we need to jump in and do them ourselves, whether it's big or small.
• 38:39
  Bernadette Woods Placky: I mean, you don't have to start a podcast.
• 38:41
  Bernadette Woods Placky: You don't have to start an organization.
• 38:43
  Bernadette Woods Placky: There's a lot you can do and just have conversations with people about climate change, help them understand where emissions are coming from, what we can do to bring those emissions down, what that means.
• 38:54
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And I often get the question is some of the questions are in a scientific world, feel a little basic, but it just shows you that people are interested and they want to know.
• 39:05
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And so we should approach them on a mutual level that not everyone has to be a climate expert, but we can still have conversations with them to help them understand what's going on and what can be done about it.
• 39:16
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And I really try to bring that with my kids too is yeah, you go be the person, you go start that conversation, you go, you know enough.
• 39:24
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So what we can do about that.
• 39:26
  Kathleen Biggins: No, I love that because that's obviously the mission of our organization, see change conversations.
• 39:31
  Kathleen Biggins: And it sure helps to know a climate expert.
• 39:34
  Bernadette Woods Placky: And people can always email you, and you guys showcase a lot of different questions.
• 39:39
  Bernadette Woods Placky: So if you do have a question that gets sciencey, there's an opportunity to get it answered.
• 39:43
  Kathleen Biggins: Yes.
• 39:43
  Kathleen Biggins: Well, I appreciate that.
• 39:45
  Kathleen Biggins: Thank you, Bernadette.
• 39:48
  Kathleen Biggins: It has been such a joy to sit down with you and learn more about weather and how climate change is indeed impacting it, and in turn, then impacting our lives on so many levels.
• 39:59
  Kathleen Biggins: Thank you for being with us.
• 40:00
  Kathleen Biggins: And thank you for all that you do, Kathleen, and your whole team.
• 40:04
  Kathleen Biggins: Thank you for joining us.
• 40:11
  Kathleen Biggins: And thank you to Bernadette Woods Placky for bringing her expertise to our table.
• 40:16
  Kathleen Biggins: If you'd like to learn more about C- Change conversations, please look at our website, the letter C-conversations with an S dot org.
• 40:26
  Kathleen Biggins: There you can find all sorts of information about climate change, but also about our outreach.
• 40:33
  Kathleen Biggins: We travel all around the country to talk to groups about the risk of climate change and what we can do about it.
• 40:40
  Kathleen Biggins: If you are interested, please reach out.
• 40:43
  Kathleen Biggins: We'd love to take this presentation to your town as well.
• 40:47
  Kathleen Biggins: Did you enjoy this episode?
• 40:50
  Kathleen Biggins: Perhaps you learned something new?
• 40:52
  Kathleen Biggins: If so, think about others who might benefit from learning about climate change in a cool-headed way and pass it along.
• 41:00
  Kathleen Biggins: Simmer Down is produced by Hans Buetow and Rebecca Fishkin.
• 41:05
  Kathleen Biggins: A special thanks to Carrie Dyckman, Nicole Curnan, and Margaret Koval.
• 41:10
  Kathleen Biggins: We hope you'll listen to our other episodes and bring the climate conversation to your kitchen table.