November 19, 2018 9:29 pm

Tuesday, Tell the Right Climate Story

How do you tell an effective story? How do you tell one about a complex subject? And, more importantly, how do you tell the story of climate change? On this episode of StarTalk All-Stars, astrobiologist and host David Grinspoon, a.k.a. Dr. FunkySpoon, sits down with comic co-host Chuck Nice and NASA climate scientist, science communicator, and returning StarTalk guest Kate Marvel to figure out how to communicate the story of climate change.

You’ll hear about Kate’s Slaying the Climate Dragon story which is “a fairy tale whose ending, still unwritten, is by no means guaranteed to be happy.” You’ll learn why we need better metaphors and analogies for climate change and why it’s so difficult to find ones that represent the complexities of the subject. We also discuss why the “inevitable doom” stories of climate change are dangerous to spread.

Find out why climate change is not a pass-fail system. And, precisely because it is such a complex and large idea, we break down what climate change is, how it works, how it impacts the Earth, and how we know it’s impacting the Earth.

We also answer your fan-submitted Cosmic Queries about climate change. You’ll discover more about how individual actions can snowball into a global change of collective consciousness. We explore why climate change is so controversial in the political realm, and Kate tells us why being an alarmist is appropriate if something is genuinely alarming.

Explore whether or not climate change would have happened if civilization never existed – and how it was changing in the past. Kate also tells us why climate change is hard to convey given that nobody experiences the average Earth temperature. All that, plus, you’ll hear why Kate still has hope in studying climate science in the future.

Please join us tomorrow night for Communicating Climate Change, with David Grinspoon at 7pm ET 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