March 5, 2018 8:53 pm

Tuesday, Explore Our Changing Climate with Bill Nye, Chuck Nice, and Climate Scientist Kate Marvel

StarTalk All-Stars is back for its Season 3 premiere! And who better to kick off our new season than Bill Nye the Science Guy himself. He’s here talking about one of his favorite subjects: climate change, with help from comic co-host Chuck Nice and climate scientist Kate Marvel. Together, Bill and the gang answer fan-submitted Cosmic Queries about the changing climate.

Climate change can sometimes be a hard concept to visualize and Kate does a great job of making it easy. As she points out, it’s hard to understand the impact of climate change because no one experiences the average temperature of the Earth. We all experience the temperatures of our own micro-ecosystems within the Earth.

So how can we tell climate change is making the temperature rise? Well, as Kate says, think of it like doping in sports. Climate Change is like we’re doping the weather. We can’t concretely link specific weather events to climate change yet, but we know what climate change does and we know that it has impacted the weather in certain ways. Just like putting performance-enhancing drugs in an athlete, we can’t say the drugs caused the athlete to win, but because we know what the drugs do, we damn well know it helps push them to victory.

You’ll also learn how to convince climate deniers of the truth about climate change, if there are advantages to nuclear energy, and what we’re currently working on, if anything, to reduce CO2 emissions already in the atmosphere.

My favorite part of the episode was the Lightning Round. Although Kate is first-time guest, she killed it during the Lightning Round. She gave great, soundbite style answers that were also highly informative and entertaining. “Can we reset the Earth?” That’s a loaded question, and can call for a very complicated answer. But, as Kate says, “Let’s not try.”

Please join us tomorrow night for Our Changing Climate, with Bill Nye at 7pm EDT right here on our website, as well as on our All-Stars channels on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn. And if you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can watch or listen to this episode ad-free at 7pm, too.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Ian Mullen