Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas23 Sep 2019

65 | Michael Mann on Why Our Climate Is Changing and How We Know

We had our fun last week, exploring how progress in renewable energy and electric vehicles may help us combat encroaching climate change. This week we're being a bit more hard-nosed, taking a look at what's currently happening to our climate. Michael Mann is one of the world's leading climate scientists, and also a dedicated advocate for improved public understanding of the issues. It was his research with Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes that introduced the "hockey stick" graph, showing how global temperatures have increased rapidly compared to historical averages. We dig a bit into the physics behind the greenhouse effect, the methods that are used to reconstruct temperatures in the past, how the climate has consistently been heating up faster than the average models would have predicted, and the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events. Happily even this conversation is not completely pessimistic — if we take sufficiently strong action now, there's still time to avert the worst possible future catastrophe.

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Michael Mann received his Ph.D. in Geology and Geophysics from Yale University. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Pennsylvania State University, with joint appointments in the Departments of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. He is the director of Penn State's Earth System Science Center. He is the author of over 200 scientific publications and four books. His most recent book is The Tantrum that Saved the World, a "carbon-neutral kids' book."

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Episoder(442)

366 | Jim Al-Khalili on Time, Quantum, Biology, and Cosmology

Everyone lives through time, but we continue to struggle to fully understand it. We remain unsure whether time is fundamental or emergent, why it has an arrow pointing from past to future, and how tha...

31 Aug 1h 15min

365 | Vitor Cardoso on Why Black Holes Are Special

Black holes, as Stephen Hawking discovered, do grow old: they emit radiation, lose mass, and eventually evaporate away. But our fascination with black holes never grows old. This is especially true to...

24 Aug 1h 5min

364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on Ignorance and Failure

One of the paradoxes of science is that it seeks objectively true understanding of the world, but its methodology is driven by ignorance, failure, and uncertainty. Some phenomena we understand pretty ...

17 Aug 1h 16min

363 | Chandra Sripada on How LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins

Large Language Models display an uncanny ability to construct human-sounding speech, and can synthesize concepts in novel ways. Is this because they are truly thinking like human beings in some way, o...

10 Aug 1h 51min

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | August 2026

Welcome to the August 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patr...

3 Aug 3h 57min

362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities

People who live in large cities produce more patents per person than those who live in small towns. They also walk faster down the street, and use less infrastructure per person. Indeed, the relations...

27 Jul 1h 20min

361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work Together

One of the characteristics of life is that living organisms gather information and put it to use. Even one of the simplest lifeforms, bacteria, are able to sense features of their surroundings and alt...

20 Jul 1h 15min

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | July 2026

Welcome to the July 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreo...

13 Jul 4h 3min