Latest / The Climate Translation / Why We Struggle to Believe Our Eyes

Transcript

Why We Struggle to Believe Our Eyes · The Climate Translation

• 0:00
  30 years ago, I sat behind a radio console in a college studio.
• 0:14
  During one of my weekly talk show broadcasts, I interviewed the director of the broadcast
• 0:19
  Meteorology program.
• 0:22
  It was a novel, degree concentration, having only been created a few years before.
• 0:28
  The idea was simple.
• 0:30
  Create a pathway for those interested in weather and communication that would provide the
• 0:35
  knowledge and experience needed to get a job at a local television or radio station.
• 0:41
  In effect, it was helping to train a new breed of science communicators.
• 0:46
  These wouldn't be just a pretty face that was plucked out of the newsroom to deliver
• 0:51
  the weather in the evenings.
• 0:53
  Instead, your local meteorologists would now have a college degree and training on how
• 0:58
  to communicate their science to the broader public.
• 1:02
  The 1990s were a golden age for weather television.
• 1:07
  The weather channel played smooth jazz during their local on the 8 segments, and meteorologists
• 1:13
  like Jim Cantori, Vivian Brown, and others became household names for viewers.
• 1:19
  This was the era before reality television, when facts and the science were presented
• 1:25
  in less of a high octane dramatic fashion.
• 1:30
  But this was also the decade that climate change shifted from something a few people were
• 1:35
  aware of to a more global and politicized issue.
• 1:40
  Indeed, during that broadcast in 1994, in that small college town in the rural south,
• 1:47
  the phrase climate change was nothing more than a chapter in a textbook.
• 1:51
  Today, it's become something more.
• 1:54
  Welcome to the podcast.
• 1:55
  I'm Dr. Mac, and I've spent my career with one foot in the clouds, literally with
• 2:01
  advanced degrees in meteorology and science education, and one foot grounded in communicating
• 2:08
  that science to the broader public.
• 2:11
  In this podcast, we aren't going to focus just on the weather.
• 2:15
  Instead, we're going to look at the truth that often it's lost along the way.
• 2:22
  Welcome to The Climate Translation.
• 2:31
  We're living in a world of data.
• 2:33
  Each of us is bombarded with headlines, commentary, podcast, and AI-generated content.
• 2:40
  We curate this content in our own ways.
• 2:43
  We hear climate scientists talk about terms such as parts per million, degrees C, global
• 2:50
  mean temperatures, and gigatons of ice melt.
• 2:54
  But for the vast majority of us, the information does not connect.
• 2:58
  We don't experience life through data points.
• 3:01
  We experience life through stories.
• 3:04
  If you've ever felt that pit and your stomach while scrolling through the headlines, that
• 3:09
  feeling of being overwhelmed by a problem that feels too big to see, this shows for
• 3:15
  you.
• 3:16
  Or perhaps more importantly, if you've ever sought across a dinner table from a friend
• 3:21
  or family member and tried to explain the why behind our changing world and felt yourself
• 3:27
  failing because the words just wouldn't come, this show is for you.
• 3:33
  My goal here is simple.
• 3:34
  We're going to strip away the jargon and look at the atmosphere through a different lens.
• 3:40
  We aren't just going to look at the science.
• 3:43
  We're going to look at the delivery of that science.
• 3:46
  We'll have episodes where we deconstruct the headlines.
• 3:50
  We'll take the alarmist clickbait of the week and translate it back into reality.
• 3:55
  We will create a dinner table toolkit, walking you through how to have a conversation with
• 4:00
  a skeptic without losing your temper or your friendship.
• 4:04
  We'll explore the history of weather by examining how we used to talk about the sky and where
• 4:10
  that connection broke down.
• 4:12
  We'll look at real-world connections and see how climate change is no longer an abstract
• 4:18
  concept for millions of people around the world.
• 4:22
  And I'll present an educator's notebook I'll share stories from their front lines of
• 4:28
  the classroom, including the questions my students ask that actually keep me up at night
• 4:34
  and the answers that finally made the light bulb go off.
• 4:38
  I want to stop the shouting across the gap between the experts and the rest of us.
• 4:44
  Instead I want to build a bridge because when you can translate the science into a story,
• 4:51
  it stops being a headline to fear and starts being a world we can actually understand.
• 4:57
  And maybe, eventually, fix.
• 5:01
  In my decades of teaching undergraduate or science and meteorology courses, I've noticed
• 5:07
  a pattern that never fails.
• 5:10
  Every term, a student walks in, arms crossed, looking a bit defensive.
• 5:16
  They're skeptical.
• 5:17
  And I always start by telling them being skeptical is great.
• 5:22
  As a scientist, you should have a skeptical eye.
• 5:25
  You should want data to inform your decisions.
• 5:29
  But for many, it's not the data informing their skepticism.
• 5:34
  It's the echo chamber.
• 5:36
  Maybe it's the news they choose, the commentators they watch, or the silos we've built around
• 5:41
  our social lives.
• 5:43
  It's become difficult to hear an opposing point of view without getting upset.
• 5:49
  But here, we're not going to debate where the data already tells a clear story.
• 5:55
  The most common gotcha I get is almost accusatory.
• 5:59
  Dr. Mac, the climate is always changing.
• 6:02
  Humans can't possibly affect the whole world.
• 6:05
  Why are we even discussing this?
• 6:08
  To that student, I say, you know what, you're 100% correct.
• 6:13
  The climate is always changing.
• 6:15
  Here is hard evidence in the geological record of massive shifts caused by plate tectonics,
• 6:22
  volcanism, and changes in orbit, which we call Milankovitch cycles.
• 6:28
  Many scientists believe that at one point in the geologic past, we had a snowball earth
• 6:33
  where the entire planet was almost covered completely in ice.
• 6:38
  We've had tropical eras where glaciers melted almost entirely and sea levels were hundreds
• 6:43
  of feet higher than they are today.
• 6:46
  Climate change is a part of Earth's history.
• 6:50
  To understand how we know the climate is changing, we have to look at the natural tape recorder
• 6:55
  of Earth's history.
• 6:57
  Scientists gather data from a variety of physical archives, including tree rings that show past
• 7:03
  growth patterns, pollen remains, and sediment samples from the ocean floor.
• 7:09
  One of the most vital sources is the study of ice cores drilled from places like Greenland
• 7:15
  and Antarctica.
• 7:16
  These cores contain tiny bubbles of air trapped hundreds of thousands of years ago, allowing
• 7:23
  us to directly sample the atmosphere, going back as far as 800,000 years.
• 7:29
  By measuring the carbon dioxide trapped in these bubbles, we can see a direct link between
• 7:35
  rising CO2 levels and increasing global temperatures over the long term.
• 7:42
  But we have to focus on the rate of that change.
• 7:46
  In the geologic record, a quick change usually happens over thousands, hundreds of thousands,
• 7:51
  even millions of years.
• 7:54
  What we're seeing now is a jump so rapid, it's almost impossible to believe.
• 8:00
  We are seeing shifts that normally take millions of years occurring in just 200.
• 8:07
  Before the Industrial Revolution, CO2 levels sat at approximately 280 parts per million.
• 8:14
  As of January 2026, those levels have surged to 427 parts per million.
• 8:22
  The compressed timescale is why 98% of climate scientists are alarmed.
• 8:28
  I think the problem is we're looking at macro-scale environments through a micro-scale brain.
• 8:34
  On a small scale, humans can see their impact.
• 8:38
  If you cut down trees in your backyard, you'll see wildlife change.
• 8:44
  If you put poison on an ant hill, you see the ants die.
• 8:48
  But once you scale it up to the size of a continent or planet, it becomes harder to conceptualize.
• 8:55
  We're clearing forest, burning coal, oil, and natural gas and putting millions of cars on the road.
• 9:02
  Every single one of those tail pipes is pumping out carbon dioxide.
• 9:08
  Imagine the world was brought down to a bubble, maybe the size of a city.
• 9:13
  If you pumped all that exhaust into that one closed bubble, everyone inside would eventually die from the poison.
• 9:21
  The earth is nothing more than a large bubble of gas, and we're rapidly changing its chemistry.
• 9:27
  But let's stop for a moment.
• 9:29
  When we talk about carbon dioxide, one of the most potent warming gases of our atmosphere,
• 9:35
  scientists talk about parts per million, or PPM, I just mentioned it.
• 9:40
  But for most people, that's verbiage.
• 9:43
  Let's break it down so it actually means something to you.
• 9:47
  Imagine you have a bathtub and it's full of clear water.
• 9:51
  One part per million is one single drop of red food dye.
• 9:56
  In the late 1700s, you could put 280 drops in that tub to represent the atmosphere.
• 10:03
  Today, you'd have to add 427.
• 10:07
  Even though 427 drops and a whole tub sound small, that's a 50% increase from several centuries ago.
• 10:16
  It's enough to change the color of the water, and for the atmosphere, that amount of gas is enough to change its ability to trap heat.
• 10:26
  Put another way, imagine a stadium with a million people in blue shirts.
• 10:31
  One part per million is one person and a red shirt.
• 10:35
  At the time of the formation of the United States, we would have had 280 red shirts scattered around in the stands.
• 10:43
  Now, there would be 427.
• 10:47
  Again, about a 50% increase.
• 10:50
  It may not sound like much, but it would make them more visible.
• 10:54
  You could also think of it in terms of medicine.
• 10:56
  If you have a headache, you might reach for an aspirin.
• 10:59
  One pill may not look like anything compared to your body mass,
• 11:03
  but it has a dramatic effect on your pain levels because it changes your internal chemistry.
• 11:09
  Increasing the dosage to two pills would make it even more dramatic.
• 11:14
  Carbon dioxide is also a potent drug for the atmosphere of the planet.
• 11:19
  We've increased the baseline by 50%, and we're seeing the effects.
• 11:24
  But, Dr. Matt, my students say, how come you keep harping on this?
• 11:29
  It's snowing outside right now. It's winter.
• 11:32
  This is a related question I get all the time.
• 11:36
  It's a confusion of the difference between weather and climate.
• 11:40
  It's a distinction that even some of our most high-profile leaders struggle with.
• 11:45
  I've seen politicians stand on the floor of the U.S. House,
• 11:49
  throw a snowball, and use that single cold day to dismiss decades of global data as hoopla.
• 11:57
  But throwing a snowball in winter to disprove climate change
• 12:01
  is like seeing your stock portfolio go down one afternoon,
• 12:05
  and you decide you're bankrupt.
• 12:08
  Weather happens day to day. It's the individual snow storm or the heat wave.
• 12:14
  Climate, however, is the long-term average.
• 12:17
  It's the big picture that tells us what to expect over years and decades.
• 12:24
  We're still going to have winter, spring, summer, and fall.
• 12:28
  We're still going to have cold days and heavy snow.
• 12:32
  The issue isn't that the weather is disappearing.
• 12:34
  It's that the norm is shifting in a way that many scientists call climate weirding.
• 12:41
  As an educator and a meteorologist, what concerns me most is their drastic change
• 12:48
  from the established norm and the increasing rate of that change we discussed earlier.
• 12:55
  Going back to our analogy, what would you think if a stock that historically saw
• 13:00
  small changes over time suddenly jumped day by day and over the course of six months
• 13:06
  increased its value by 50 percent? That stock would have the attention of every investor trying
• 13:13
  to determine what was causing the change. We humans are looking at the global climate system
• 13:20
  that has lost its balance. While a snowball makes good sound bites,
• 13:25
  it doesn't change the fact that the underlying physics of our atmosphere is moving into dangerous,
• 13:31
  uncharted territory. Now, it's one thing for me to stand in front of a lecture hall with a PhD
• 13:38
  in a whiteboard and explain the rate of change. It's quite another for you to do it at a family
• 13:44
  barbecue or over a holiday dinner. I know that feeling. The pit and your stomach when someone
• 13:51
  you care about says, it's a la hoax. It's just a natural cycle. Your instinct is to fight data
• 13:58
  with more data. Maybe you want to quote what I have talked about here or shout about ice cores
• 14:04
  in parts per million. But here is a lesson I learned from my time as a TV meteorologist in South
• 14:12
  Texas and later speaking at public aquariums on the Gulf Coast. You cannot fact check someone out
• 14:18
  of a position they didn't fact check themselves into. Most skepticism isn't about science. It's
• 14:25
  about the echo chamber we discussed earlier, the commentators and the silos. So how do you build
• 14:31
  the bridge I promised? Well, you can start with the yes and when someone says the climate has changed
• 14:40
  before, don't argue. Say you're absolutely right. You clearly know your history. They can help
• 14:47
  lower the temperature of the room. Focus on the now. Transition from the distant past to the present.
• 14:54
  Use the stock portfolio or the bathtub analogy we just walked through. It's much easier for people
• 15:01
  to visualize doubling the red dye than it is to visualize atmospheric forcing. Make it local.
• 15:09
  In the American South, I don't talk about the Arctic. I talk about the weather and climate they
• 15:14
  have experienced in their lifetime. Ask them what they've noticed in their own backyard. Have the
• 15:21
  summers felt longer? Have weird storms become more frequent? This moves the conversation from a global
• 15:28
  political debate to a shared observation of the world outside the window. The goal isn't to
• 15:35
  win a debate. Believe me, most of the time you won't. I learned that lesson the hard way.
• 15:41
  Instead, the goal is to be a translator. When you stop being a lecturer and start being a neighbor
• 15:48
  who understands the weather, the conversation can change. As an educator, when I hear the hesitation
• 15:55
  in a student's voice or neighbors, I've learned to recognize it isn't about a lack of intelligence.
• 16:02
  More often than not, it's a lack of connection. Again, we're a micro-scale creature is trying to
• 16:08
  make sense of a macro-scale world. And when that connection breaks, we retreat into what's
• 16:15
  comfortable. Today I want to leave you with one thought. Science isn't something you believe in.
• 16:22
  We've fallen into a trap where we treat climate science like a matter of faith or political identity.
• 16:29
  We ask people, do you believe in science? But science doesn't ask for your belief. It asks for
• 16:36
  your curiosity. Think of science as a tool, a pair of glasses that allows us to see a world
• 16:44
  that is otherwise too big or too fast for our tiny brains to conceptualize.
• 16:50
  When we look through the lens of those ice cores or those tree rings, we aren't looking for a
• 16:55
  belief system. We're looking for a truth that is written into the very chemistry of our planet.
• 17:02
  In the classroom, I tell my students that the light bulb moment doesn't happen when they finally
• 17:08
  agree with me. I don't want them to blindly agree with me. I want them to question me. I want them
• 17:16
  to question themselves. I want them to seek out their own answers. But I want those answers to
• 17:22
  be based on data, not on hyperbole. My hope is they realize the atmosphere isn't an abstract
• 17:30
  political debate. It's the air they're breathing right now. It's that bubble we all live in.
• 17:37
  So this week I challenge you. The next time you see a headline that makes you want to retreat
• 17:43
  into your silo, don't ask yourself if you believe it. Ask yourself what is the data trying to tell
• 17:50
  you about the rate of change in your own backyard? Let's not shouting across the gap and start using
• 17:58
  the tools that we have to see the world more clearly. Thank you for joining me for this first
• 18:05
  episode. I know that diving into the data can feel like trying to drink from a fire hose sometimes.
• 18:11
  But remember, the goal isn't to memorize everything. I tell my students that all the time,
• 18:18
  the goal is to understand the story there is telling us.
• 18:30
  If you have a question about the climate you've been too afraid to ask,
• 18:34
  or if you have a differing opinion, I want to hear from you. I can use your viewpoints in future
• 18:39
  episodes. We don't build bridges by talking to ourselves. We build bridges by engaging with the
• 18:46
  people on the other side. I'm Dr. Mac, whether I'm in the classroom, in front of a green screen,
• 18:53
  or right behind this microphone, I'm dedicated to finding the truth that gets lost along the way.
• 19:00
  This has been The Climate Translation. I'll see you next time.