Climate Science! With NASA’s Gavin Schmidt

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries edition, special live at the Broward County Youth Climate Summit, the third annual.

So, delighted to be a part of that.

I’ve got with me my co-host, Chuck Nice.

Hey, Neil.

So, obviously, while I know a little bit about climate, I don’t know anything near who we’ve got here as guests.

A very important addition to this, because for Cosmic Queries, we want to make sure we have the right expertise at the right time, at the right place, which is now.

I’ve got Gavin Schmidt.

Gavin, welcome back to StarTalk.

Hi, Neil, Chuck.

Nice to be back.

Hey, Gavin.

Excellent.

And you recently became seat, in addition to being director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which is a NASA satellite office in Manhattan.

Many people don’t know about that one.

They know about Kennedy Space Center and Houston.

But we’ve got a little pocket of NASA in New York City, and you’re there as our neighbor, so good to know that.

But you’re also elevated or is this a promotion, I guess, to senior advisor on climate to NASA.

So it’s nice to know that such a position exists.

Well, it does now, yes.

It does now, and it’s not good enough just to research on climate.

This stuff has to get communicated.

And if you’re an advisor to NASA, and NASA is a hugely public entity in our lives, not only domestically, but in the world, you’ve got a really key place there.

And let me just lead off.

Before we get to the questions that I know Chuck has collected, because that’s the DNA of this format, is questions from you, from the public, coming back to get answered in our StarTalkian way.

But let me just ask you, Gavin, should we not be surprised that this Youth Climate Summit is being organized in Florida and not Colorado or one of the mountain states?

If you could tell us what special relationship Florida has with climate change.

Well, you know, Florida is Grand Zero for the impacts of things like sea level rise, coastal flooding, greater intensity of hurricanes.

And so, you know, we’re seeing changes in the temperature of the sea around Florida.

We’re seeing changes in the storm climate, and we’re seeing sea level rise.

And that puts Florida very much at the Grand Zero for the really acute impacts of climate change that’s happening now, not least the things that may be happening in the future.

You know, I remember seeing, was it not last year, but perhaps the year before, there was a satellite photo of hurricanes all lined up, ready to slam into Florida.

It was like, okay, your turn.

It was like they were lining up at the deli, right?

And I just have no memory of seeing such persistence of salt on the coastline.

Yeah, 2020 was a very bad year for hurricanes.

A very, very active Atlantic season.

2005 was a really big year, too.

And that’s not what you expect every year, thankfully.

But we are seeing, we are seeing trends in, you know, Caribbean hurricanes.

We’re seeing more, those are being more frequent.

They’re more intense when they arise.

We’re seeing increases in, you know, Cat 3, 4, 5 hurricanes.

And we think that that’s being fueled by the warmer temperatures in the tropical Atlantic and places.

So, yeah, so it’s, that was very sobering.

Chuck, did you hear?

He’s on a first name basis with the hurricane level.

Yes, Cat 5.

One last thing before we run over to Chuck and get some questions that have been pre-collected.

Last year, 2020, I heard there was like Hurricane Alpha, and I thought to myself, Alpha?

Did we run out of letters of the alphabet to name these works?

We’re starting to use the Greek alphabet?

So what’s up with that?

I didn’t know that was in the rules and regulations.

That’s exactly right.

Yeah, so the National Weather Service has a list of pre-approved names, and they have it for, I think, out for another five years.

It’s not every letter of the alphabet, but I think it’s 23 names.

I might not be quite right, but once you’ve run out of those, then you start doing these Greek alphabets, alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon.

And so when you’re seeing Hurricane Alpha, you know it’s been a bad season.

And now, why only 23 of the letters?

I mean, what names did they omit that are just so awful?

So there’s never been a Hurricane Xavier?

So no Xs.

No Xs.

There’s no Xs.

I’m looking forward to Hurricane Yvonne.

You need to modernize the names, right?

Yeah, exactly.

They do modernize the names.

I mean, so it used to be all very Anglo names, you know, Arthur and Charlie, and now they’re also taking names from a broader cultural background.

See, but is that a good or a bad thing?

In a way, it’s a good thing because it means that we’re recognizing that there’s cultural diversity.

But in a way, it’s a bad thing because you’re being named after a hurricane.

You know, I don’t want to, I don’t, you know, in a way, it’s like, oh, okay, Chuck.

Right.

Or the seaboard.

Hurricane Roshaniqua.

Like, you know, and then what if it’s like the worst hurricane ever?

And it’s like a black name.

You know what I mean?

Just like, oh, of course, Hurricane LeDamien got to be the worst hurricane ever.

Like, all right.

So, Chuck, let’s do this.

All right.

Let’s just jump into it.

What do you have for us?

Of course, all these questions come from the students of Broward County.

And I think let’s start with Hayden M.

And let me see here.

Hayden.

Oh, my goodness.

Tradewinds.

Do you have Hayden’s great grade and what school?

He is in grade five at Tradewinds Elementary.

So and he says this.

It’s a great question.

Who first noticed global warming?

Which is a great question because people may think it’s a relatively new phenomenon.

So the answer to that is actually actually goes back a long time.

There was a guy called Callender, interestingly enough, in the 1930s, who was the first person to put together a time series of temperatures.

And with his knowledge of what happens in the atmosphere and the important role of carbon dioxide, he had hypothesized that he should be able to see a trend.

And he was working in the kind of mid-30s, so kind of 1938, I think, and he put together this data set, which was pretty sparse, but it was enough to see that indeed the temperatures had changed from the beginning of the 20th century, so about 1900, through to 1930.

And he said, yes, oh look, it seems to be getting warmer, and this is something that we expect to happen, because the physics of this had been worked out in the Victorian era, in the 19th century, and people knew that we were burning a lot of coal, we were burning a lot of oil, and we were expecting things to happen, and happen, they did.

But yeah, no, it was in the 1930s that people started to notice what was going on, and then we ignored it for another 30 years, but yeah, 1930s.

And that’s working out great, right?

How’s that working out for you?

Yeah, it’s like 1930s, we find out that we are indeed warming the planet, and we go, eh, we’ll get to it at some point.

But I want to drive my car.

Right.

Wow.

Forget about the earth, I want to drive my car.

But of course, if there is no earth, you can’t drive your car.

So people got to work out the causes and effects of your desires there.

All right, Chuck, what else you got for me?

All right, let’s keep moving.

And let’s go to Camilla B, who is at sixth grade in Indian Ridge Middle School.

Hello, Camilla.

And Camilla asked this.

How fast are glaciers and icebergs melting?

Oh, Camilla has a sense of urgency.

She’s like, look, I need to know what is going down.

Because I’m here in Florida and I need to know if I should move.

So you’ve heard the phrase, right, glacially slow, right, to mean something really moving so slowly that you can’t even see what’s going on.

Well, glacially slow does not mean what it used to mean, right?

So glaciers are moving…

In fact, Gavin, I haven’t heard that term used in that way in at least 10 years.

It’s moving at a glacial pace.

No one says that anymore.

That’s amazing.

Because we know deep down we are moving those puppies and melting them down.

Okay, go on.

I’m sorry to interrupt you.

No, no, that’s fine.

I mean, you’re right.

Nobody says glacially slow anymore, because the glaciers are really moving quite fast.

What we do at NASA is that we can keep track of how much water and ice there is on Greenland or in Antarctica.

And we have these records that they’re measuring the gravity of the planet.

And when the ice melts, then the gravity goes down a little bit.

And we can track that from space, which is pretty impressive, quite frankly.

Wait, wait, just to be clear, Gavin, we know the gravity of Earth as a collective body.

When you say NASA is measuring gravity, you mean they’re measuring the difference in gravity from one part of Earth’s surface to the other.

Isn’t that what you’re talking about?

Yeah, and over time as well.

If more mass is in one place than another, it’s going to have slightly extra gravity there rather than here.

That’s right.

So there’s more gravity above a mountain than there is over the ocean.

And there’s more gravity above a big ice sheet than over a little ice sheet.

And so as the ice sheets shrink, then the gravity goes down a little bit and you can calculate how much mass has disappeared from the ice and has gone into the ocean.

And so we keep track of that and we can measure, for instance, the loss of mass from Greenland.

It’s about 250 gigatons of water every year is leaving Greenland.

And it’s about 150 gigatons of water every year that’s leaving Antarctica, mostly from the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica, which is the bit which is…

If you go all the way down through South America to the bit that sticks out, that’s the peninsula, and then the bit just to the side of that is West Antarctica.

So most of the mass…

So giga is billions.

No, giga is 10 to the 9.

Billion tons.

250 billion tons.

That’s right.

Every year.

Every year?

Wow.

That’s a lot of water.

And that water is…

So that’s fresh water going into salt water?

Yeah.

That can’t be good, right?

So that’s fresh water from the land that’s going into the ocean, and it raises sea level.

It does get spread out mostly evenly around the ocean.

And that’s adding about a millimeter per year in global sea level.

And the total amount of sea level is made up of that, plus changes in mountain glaciers.

They’re melting quite quickly.

And then the warming of the ocean itself is also causing the sea level to rise.

So the sea level rise right now is about just over three millimeters a year, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s been about a foot around Florida in the last 60 to 100 years, I’d say.

And what I try to tell people is if you fill a glass completely with water and then add three millimeters, 100% of what you add in spills.

Let’s understand that.

And also there’s another issue here, right?

Where if you’re adding fresh water at large rates to saltwater, that changes the sort of the circulation patterns and the sea level mix that previously relied and evolved on what was a stable salt mixture.

Is that correct?

Right.

So the changes in fresh water, so fresh water is lighter than saltwater, so it tends to sit on the top, at least to start with, before it gets mixed down.

That changes how easy it is for heat to get into the ocean, for carbon to get into the ocean.

And so one of the things that we’ve seen in the oceans as things have warmed up and we’ve got this extra fresh water, is that it’s becoming harder to get things down into the ocean, and that’s heat and carbon.

And so that’s actually adding to the temperatures in the atmosphere, it’s adding to the carbon in the atmosphere, and so it’s actually, that’s not good news either.

All right, Chuck, keep them coming, Chuck.

Yeah, this is just going to get more and more depressing, I’m sorry.

No, you better have something positive to say at the end of this.

Otherwise, this is the last time we’re inviting you on something like this.

So let’s go to, let’s go to Maya E.

And Maya E is in grade five at trade winds.

Hi, Maya.

And she says, what can we do as kids to slow down the global warming process?

So here’s something that’s a little more encouraging and helpful.

You got to remember that you’re not just a kid, right?

You are a son or a daughter.

You are a classmate.

You are an advocate.

You are a consumer.

But you’re all of these things.

And one of the most impressive things that’s happened over the last couple of years related to climate is the outpouring of activity and concern from youth climate leaders like Greta Thunberg and Alex Villasenor in the US, who have kind of taken this and really pushed it.

They pushed it to the top tables, to the UN, to government decision makers, and made it very, very clear that it’s not OK just to sit around and not do anything.

It’s not OK to know that this is a crisis and not act in a commensurate way.

And there’s been an enormous amount of truly authentic concerns about your future.

I mean, speaking to the youth, I mean, not so much my future, but your future.

You know, this is going to be the issue of your entire lives.

It’s not going to go away next year.

It’s not going to go away in 10 years’ time.

It’s going to be a very, very real issue for all of that time.

And your role as somebody, as people who can get the grownups and the decision makers to act in your interests is really very important.

So, yes, I mean, you can encourage local recycling.

You can encourage renewable energy.

You can encourage your school to have a zero-waste cafeteria.

All of these things are good and positive steps.

What you’re saying, Gavin, is that even if someone in middle school does not have power of title or power of any other sort of high-ranking official, you have the power, you have social and cultural power.

Because if you’re 12 years old and you write a letter to the editor of the local paper that you’re concerned, I bet they’re going to publish it.

And so you can have influence beyond title.

Because if the 10-year-olds start worrying about how the adults are messing up the environment, that’s something to take notice of.

It makes the adults feel bad.

And you know what?

Kids should make adults feel bad because they have something to feel bad about.

Start guilting your parents, kids.

Start guilting your parents.

Mom, dad, you don’t love me.

You don’t love me.

Look at what you’re doing.

Look at what you’re doing to the planet, mom, dad.

You don’t love me.

You guys suck.

You suck.

Grown-ups suck.

Grown-ups suck.

That would be less productive, I think, Chuck.

By the way, Chuck has three kids.

What are the ages of your kids, Chuck?

I have a 20-year-old, and then I have a 14-year-old, and then I have a 7-year-old because I’m an idiot.

No.

No.

And I do have three children, and I try my best.

So you get all three different perspectives there at those different ages.

It’s great to see because, believe it or not, the 20-year-old is concerned about climate, but not as much as the 14-year-old, and the 7-year-old is a full-blown activist.

So when I see these questions from middle schoolers, I think it’s fantastic that they are already keyed in on this as a true issue of concern.

So it’s fantastic.

I’m Joel Cherico, and I make pottery.

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This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Welcome back to StarTalk.

This episode is from a virtual livestream cosmic queries with the Broward County Youth Climate Summit in Florida.

And we’ve been talking about the science of climate change with my cohost Chuck Nice and our special guest climatologist, Gavin Schmidt.

And we’ve been answering questions from the students themselves about the future of this climate crisis in which we find ourselves.

So let’s get right back to it.

All right, Chuck, keep it coming.

All right, let’s keep going now.

If you’ve just joined us, probably you should have been there from the beginning, but if you just joined us, we are at the Broward County Youth Climate Summit, third annual, and we’re talking to Floridians about climate.

And we’ve got with me Gavin Schmidt, senior advisor to NASA on climate and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

I didn’t say it at the beginning, but Goddard, it’s abbreviated GISS, and GISS specializes in many things, but especially climate on planets.

What is the atmosphere is doing?

What the environment around, you know, solar heating, cooling within the atmospheres, turbulence, all of this.

So Earth as just another planet can give you a cosmic perspective on the things that can go wrong in a planetary atmosphere.

Right.

Right.

And so Gavin, tell me two planets where stuff really went wrong in the past.

So that was, that was, and that’s an easy one.

So you’ve got Venus and you’ve got Mars.

So Venus, we’ve actually…

One is to our left and the other is to our right.

They’re adjacent to us, okay?

Yeah.

And so Venus may well have been the first habitable planet in the solar system.

And for a long time, for about a billion years, it may have been able to maintain water at the surface.

But as the sun got brighter over time, and it’s still getting a little bit brighter, the oceans evaporated, the hydrogen was lost, and it’s turned into a hellhole where lead will melt on the surface.

Gavin, I do think, yes, it can melt lead fine, but you could cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza on your windowsill in three seconds.

So that’s an advantage, you see?

There’s a silver lining to this high-temperature place.

Exactly.

Except that your charred remains will have a delicious meal.

You’d be vaporized too, but ignoring that complication, it would be an awesome pizza oven.

That’s all I’m saying.

But like I said, it might have been the first habitable place in the solar system for about a billion years.

So something bad happened on Venus.

Something bad.

Something bad happened on Venus.

All right, now how about Mars?

Now Mars, now we see evidence for water on Mars.

And so we think that at some point Mars, a little bit more recently than Venus, was habitable.

There was sufficient water on the surface to have running water.

And so we’re trying to work out what combination of atmospheric composition could have led to that.

But that is long in the past.

You know, and now obviously Mars is extremely dry.

It’s lost whatever, I mean, it still has some atmosphere, but it lost a lot of its atmosphere.

It lost a lot of its water.

And now it does not have very much of a greenhouse effect and is very cold and has pretty sunsets.

And you would be hard pressed to cook a pepperoni pizza at any time right now on Mars.

Okay, so Mars doesn’t have any running water anymore, but it once did, but it has pretty sunsets.

So Chuck, there’s it.

So those are the two reasons, one to go to Venus and one to go to Mars to get a pretty sunset.

Yes.

That’s right.

So, you know, no air, but God, the views.

Views are beautiful.

The views are gorgeous.

Can’t breathe, but enjoy those views.

Okay, here we go.

Let’s-

Keep them coming.

I love this question from Sierra E.

And Sierra E is in the ninth grade at Carl Springs High School.

And Sierra is not playing around.

She wants to know this.

What kind of jobs are there for people interested in climate and climate studies?

Sierra, let me just say, Sierra, I’m already proud of you, okay?

You’re not only looking to solve the existential crisis that faces all of mankind, but you’re like, how do I make some money off of this?

I love you, Sierra, that’s the way to think.

So, there’s some great opportunities.

The kinds of tech jobs that are going to be important are things like smart grid technology, storage technology, renewables, all of those things that are going to be growing enormously.

Energy storage.

When you say storage, energy storage.

And then you’ve got the adaptation part of it.

How do you help cities and agriculture plan for the changes to come?

There’s a lot of social science issues there.

There’s a lot of politics involved there.

But without those people, all the technology in the world doesn’t help us.

Things need to be deployed.

Things need to be used.

How is that change going to happen?

And the people that are making that change or helping enable that change, they’re going to be the most important people around.

And those aren’t necessarily STEM jobs.

They could be public service.

They could be urban planning.

They could be people who are interested in sewage and septic tanks and dealing with the legacy of what we’ve built now and the infrastructure that’s in peril right now and how to make it resilient and how to deal with the problems that are going to come.

Yeah, Gavin, that’s a brilliant, brilliant answer there.

And I had not fully grocked how interdisciplinary climate science in our society would be.

Because, right, you said you need the scientists, you’re among them.

You need the policy people, you’re among them.

But a cool invention that pulls us off of fossil fuels into other forms of energy, that would be industry.

But then you still have to deploy it, so you get the politics.

I love it.

Everybody can get a piece of that pie.

It’s a problem that affects every single area of our lives, which means that if you think of it in terms of systems change, then whatever you do in life, if you relate it to climate, there is an application.

And by the way, I have not fully grocked the word grocked.

What the hell was that?

It’s a geek word, and I forgot what its origin is.

Robert Heinlein.

Robert Heinlein, thank you.

It comes from science fiction.

It’s spelled G-R-O-K.

G-R-O-K.

And it has to do with wrapping your head around an issue or a problem and coming to terms with it within yourself, possibly then being able to do something about it.

Am I good there?

Did I get that right, Gavin?

I think so.

I’m trying to remember the book in which it first appeared.

It might have been The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I forget the details.

But it was very big in the 1960s and 70s.

Well, there you go, kids.

For the youth among us, that’s where it comes from.

This is when you know that you’re in the secret astrophysics club, when you can actually use the word G-R-O-K and then know its frickin origins.

You’re seeing the secret geek speak that these scientists have with one another.

I’m sorry.

Someone look that up.

Which book did it come from?

Live Long and Prosper, yeah.

Thank you for bringing it back down to my level.

Thank you.

All right, let’s move on to Sean D, who has a very sobering question.

He’s at grade six at Margate Middle School.

And Sean D wants to know this.

What do you fear will happen in the future if we take no action?

All right.

So there goes Gavin.

Give us the apocalyptic scenarios.

Well, let me start off.

I’ll start off.

I’ll start off and I’ll hand off to you.

The Broward County Youth Climate Summit in 20 years will be held underwater.

Yeah, that’s not funny.

Okay, I’m sorry.

What was funny was you say, hey, that’s not funny.

That was funny.

I mean, if we don’t rise to this moment, then the sea will rise to this moment.

Oh, wow.

You know, if we don’t get our heads around this.

I’m telling you right now, that’s a T-shirt.

That’s a T-shirt.

That’s a T-shirt, a bumper sticker, a meme.

Yeah.

Okay, all right.

Wait, wait, say that again so we can get a meme shot of you.

I want to get a screenshot.

Okay, go.

Say it again.

If we don’t rise to this moment, the seas will rise to this moment.

Wow.

That’s beautiful.

Mic drop.

We’re done here.

No, but this is a serious question.

I mean, the worst-case scenarios that we plotted out, if we don’t do anything, we just burn all of the fossil fuels that we can, we burn all of the coal, all of the oil, the methane hydrates, the tar sands, the oil shales, all of the rest of it, we could have an impact on this planet that has not been seen in tens of millions of years, maybe even longer.

The Anthropocene, the period that we’re now creating, would be so far out of the normal bounds of climate variability that, quite frankly, we don’t even know what kind of a planet that would be.

We’re talking about something more recent, like the last ice age, which was only 20,000 years ago, and that was caused by wobbles in the Earth’s orbit.

That was about 8 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than today.

The worst-case scenarios, if we just don’t do anything and burn everything that we can find, that’s about 8 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than where we are now.

And the last ice age, think about that, you know, massive ice sheets across the whole of North America, mammoths and a very, very different planet.

And then kind of like flip that and say, well, what kind of planet would it be if it was that much warmer?

And we don’t know.

We don’t know what kind of planet that would be.

It would be one that we and our current society would be in trouble.

We have so much stuff next to the coast.

We have so many expectations.

Our agriculture, where we grow things, how we grow things, depends on the climate where we are.

If things shift such a degree, then all of those anticipations, all of those expectations are worthless.

Wait, Gavin, you said we have so much stuff near the coast.

Yeah, New York and harbors.

We move things around.

But Shanghai and Calcutta and Bombay, Mumbai, you know, Tianjin, London, Paris, all of these places are actually very close to the coasts.

And if you think that our heritage, such as it is, should be worth preserving, then not doing anything about climate change is not the way to maintain that.

So now, as we talk about the loss of these coastal cities, is there a way to target climate change so that we could just take out a few places that perhaps that we don’t want around anymore?

I’m joking, Gavin.

That’s a joke.

If he had a sign, he’d better say joke on it.

Then I would know.

No.

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Thank you.

So welcome back to StarTalk.

This episode is from a virtual live stream cosmic queries with the Broward County Youth Climate Summit.

That’s Broward County, Florida.

We’ve been talking about the science of climate change.

I’ve got my co-host Chuck Nice and our special guest climatologist Gavin Schmidt.

And we’ve been answering questions from the students themselves about the future of the climate crisis.

So, let’s get back to it.

All right, so let’s go to Natalia P.

She’s in 11th grade over at West Broward High School.

And she’s looking at this from a policy standpoint.

What are some laws that could be enacted in order to slow down climate change?

So, is there anything that we can do that we should ask our governments to do to take us out of this?

Yeah, so I’m part of the government, so I have to be a little bit careful here.

So, you know, I can give my personal opinion.

Obviously, you know, NASA doesn’t really have much of an impact on laws and policy directly.

But, you know, my personal view is that, you know, there are laws that exist that are pushing us in the right direction.

Things like renewable standards for electricity.

Things like, you know, encouraging electric vehicles over internal combustion vehicles.

A price on carbon is something that nudges everything in the right direction so that you actually pay for the pollution that you put into the atmosphere.

These things are difficult to enact, and there’s a lot of politics behind what actually does get enacted.

But even things that you think might be trivial, like building codes, you know, you can do a lot with improving building codes so that they take account of not just the climate changes that we’ve had, but the climate changes that we’re going to have.

We can make rules that make buildings use less energy and made with more resilient structures.

I mean, so we can both legislate to improve resilience and to reduce energy wastage.

So, you know, laws on standards for refrigerators.

You know, I mean, the fact that we’ve had more efficient refrigerators for the last 50 years has saved an enormous number of power stations from ever being built.

So, efficiency gains can be helped.

Like the CAFE standards, where they’re looking at the miles per gallon of the vehicle fleet.

All of those things are pushing us in the right direction.

All right.

That’s hopeful.

That is hopeful.

We like that.

Let’s…

Alessandro.

Oh, by the way, so West Broward High School?

Yeah.

So, go Bobcats.

Oh, right on.

Okay.

Why know that?

I don’t know, but go Bobcats.

All right.

Go ahead.

Alessandro M is a fifth grader at Tradewinds Elementary School, and she’s got a good question about what does global warming have to do with severe weather events like storms and heat waves, droughts and hurricanes?

I love that because, Gavin, think about it.

If you’re just thinking, all right, it’s one degree warmer in the world.

The temperature fluctuates so much more than that between day and night.

How could one degree matter to anything else that’s going on on this planet?

What’s up with that?

So really that’s a question of how things change on average and how that gets translated into things that we think of more as weather.

And that’s a great question.

But first, tell us the difference between weather and climate.

Just spend a minute.

Yeah, so weather, I mean, you know, it’s what’s happening today.

What’s happening next week, it’s changeable, it’s kind of chaotic.

And climate is really the average of all of that, you know, averaged over many years and looking at the statistics over many years.

And there isn’t, it’s not totally obvious how these things connect.

But we now have a large enough climate change signal that we’re starting to see how those things connect.

So let me give you some of the pathways by which these connections happen.

So as the planet gets warmer, it’s warmed more than a degree Celsius, so it’s almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit at this point in the last 100 years or so, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere increases.

So it turns out that you increase the water vapor by about 10% with that amount of temperature change.

So there’s now 10% more water in the air than there used to be.

And if you think about storms and if you think about rain systems, what you’re doing there is you’re gathering up a lot of quite moist air, you’re pushing it up, and then it all rains out.

And if there’s more water in the air, more water vapor in the air, when you squeeze it all together and you push it up, it comes out, and it comes out more and stronger.

And so what we’ve seen over the last few decades…

By the way, that’s just what Floridians want.

They want more humid air.

Well, I mean, so it is getting more humid.

I mean, you can track that in the weather statistics in Miami as well.

But yeah, so you have more humid air and you have more intense rainfall.

And you can see that happening not just associated with big storm events like hurricanes, but you can see it more generally when you have a front coming through, you know, kind of from the Pacific side to the Atlantic side.

You can see that the statistics of rain are pushing us towards more intense rainfall.

And we discussed it earlier, you know, the temperatures themselves in the ocean are leading to more intense storms in the Atlantic because the heat of the water is really the fuel that drives the hurricanes.

And so we’re seeing more intense hurricanes happening because of those temperatures as well.

Wait, Gavin, if it’s one degree on average, that means in some places it will be much more than that.

Right, so the places that are warming the most actually are in the high latitudes.

In the Arctic, it’s warmed three, four, some places five degrees Celsius.

Just where we need it.

Yeah, no, not really.

But we’re seeing quite clear warming in the tropical Atlantic that’s one of the places where most of the hurricanes start off.

And so that’s kind of juicing them up a little bit.

And obviously, if the temperatures are warming and weather is that kind of noise on top of that, you’re going to see more heat waves, more days over 90 degrees, more days over 100 degrees.

And you can see that happening all around the world, from Australia through to the US, to Europe, to Japan, to Asia.

You know, we had massive heat waves in Siberia last summer.

You know, Siberia, not a warm place, but they had like 100 degrees above the Arctic Circle.

That’s not usual, right?

In fact, it may even be unique.

A new vacation spot, a new vacation spot, Siberia.

Well, lots of beachfront property there.

Well, we only have a few minutes left.

Let’s see if we can get a few squeezed in there, and, Gavin, this is going to be a lightning round.

So real quick, give me your best soundbite answer.

Go, Chuck.

This is for…

Well, we’re going to switch gears here, because this is from Carlos B and Tyler B.

I don’t know if they’re related.

Pines Middle School and Pioneer Middle School respectively, grades seven and six.

What got you interested in being an astrophysicist, planetary scientist, author and science communicator?

That’s for both of you.

Thanks for asking about being a comedian there, Tyler.

Appreciate that, Carlos.

And then Tyler B says, what inspired you to do what you do?

So what got you interested in the specific work that you do, and what made you go to science in the first place?

I don’t know how soundbiteable this is, so we’re probably going to have to end on these questions.

So, Gavin, why don’t you go?

For me, I started with mathematics, and it was the joy of just kind of solving things and solving puzzles, and then I got into things that actually meant things to people.

And I realized that you could solve problems that people would appreciate and that they would care about.

And the more that I’ve done and the more that people care and the more I’m able to talk to people about these things, the more excited and the more interested I got in the science that I was doing.

So you got good feedback on your ambitions.

Yeah, that’s a very important thing, because not everyone, if you like math, and then you have a peer group that says, you like math, you know, that could turn a lot of people off if they still want to sort of hang out with the cool kids.

And by the way, if that happens to you, anyone listening, they’re just jealous that you’re good at math.

Don’t fall for it.

And Chuck, is it true that when you were a kid, if you’re cracking up in class, the teacher says, if you keep this up, you’ll only amount to being a comedian?

Absolutely, yeah.

I’ve had that said to me, like, what do you think, you are a comedian?

I’m life.

So for me, my profile is well known, I think because I’ve written about it and spoken about it.

I was nine years old and a first trip to my local planetarium, the Hayden Planetarium.

And in fact, when I sign off this show, my tagline is, keep looking up.

That was a famous tagline, who was called the Star Hustler from the Miami Planetarium for many, many years.

And he was the head of the planetarium, and he had a show, a short bit on PBS, giving sort of that week’s night sky.

And what was his name?

Jack, I’ll remember it in a minute.

And so he signed off, but he died several years back.

And I say, somebody’s got to carry that forward.

So I carry his legacy.

Whenever I sign off, I say, keep looking up.

So planetariums can be a tremendous force of influence on people’s interest in looking up, but also astrophysics, just the universe in general, is a gateway science.

It’s a gateway science because if you’re interested in that, then you find out, oh my gosh, there’s biology there.

There’s engineering that make the satellites.

There’s physics, there’s chemistry.

And so you come for the universe and you stay for the whole rest of that smorgasbord of science.

And I looked up at the night sky in the planetarium and I said, oh my gosh, the limitless discovery that awaits us is what attracted me.

And to communicate science, I agree with Gavin here.

If you tell somebody something and they like it and they want more, that’s kind of, that’s reinforcing.

And then you find something else to tell them that’s really cool and interesting about your field.

And as Carl Sagan once said, when you’re in love, you want to tell the world.

So I think we got to call it quits there.

Oh my gosh, this was fun.

And this is our Cosmic Queries format.

And I’m delighted that we got asked by the Broward County School System to bring our Cosmic Queries format into your universe because that’s what we do and it’s what we love to do.

And Gavin, always great to have you on StarTalk.

Always a pleasure, thank you very much.

Okay, and we got to make sure that the President of the United States will have your ear with the head of NASA.

And so if stuff doesn’t go right, we’ll blame you.

That’s fair, that’s fair.

That’s fair, that’s totally fair.

And Chuck, it’s always good to have you.

Thanks for bringing us a force of levity into this world, because sometimes we need it, otherwise we’ll just cry.

It’s always a pleasure.

I’m just saying.

And let me end by declaring that I don’t know in the history of the world if there’s ever been a community of adults who, upon looking at the next generation, said, I can’t wait till y’all take over to fix this stuff.

Take a look at what adults have said about the next generation for the past 4,000 years.

And we’ve always worried about what the next generation would be and do.

But maybe for the first time, the opposite is the case.

So y’all hurry up, get older, and gain the power we need to fix this world.

Save us, children.

I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson.

You’re a personal astrophysicist.

As always, bidding you to keep looking up.