This Brand New Podcast Helps You Understand And Talk About Climate Change

Perhaps you’re the kind of person who thinks: “Hey, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere just rocketed past the milestone of 400 ppm. It seems like every month is the ‘hottest month on record’, and climate scientists keep saying unnerving things like ‘we’re in uncharted territory.’ Shouldn’t we be talking about this?” 

If so, you’re in luck. A new podcast called Warm Regards promises to deliver your weekly fix of climate conversation.  The show is hosted Eric Holthaus, a science journalist at Slate who writes regularly about climate change. The show's co-hosts are Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist, and Andy Revkin, a science reporter at the New York Times. As mentioned in the inaugural episode, Revkin holds the distinction of being the only journalist who was ever told “Why don’t you just go kill yourself” by Rush Limbaugh. 

The first episode starts at the beginning. The hosts discuss what initially drew them to climate change. Gill notes that she first became interested in climate change because the modern era is so starkly different from the past. “Understanding the past is what made contemporary climate change so alarming,” she says. “What we’re doing to the planet is pushing the Earth’s system out of this natural range of variability that’s gone on for thousands or even millions of years.”

They move on to talk about how to communicate climate issues with the public, and why cognitive science says that even the best arguments and evidence don’t usually sway people — which is why rebutting the claims of climate denialists is usually a waste of time. 

Give it a listen if you want to better understand climate change, and how people who are working on the climate problem talk amongst themselves.