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It’s official! June and July were the warmest we’ve seen since records began over a century ago. Fires are rampant across Canada, and we’re seeing record droughts around the world. Today, we’re going to look at 20 years of climate science, how well does reality match up with the predictions.
Show Notes
Record shattering: Earth had its hottest July in 174 years (NOAA)
This is Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, researchers say (Washington Post)
Rainforest (National Geographic)
What’s the Difference Between Weather and Climate? (NOAA)
Parts of South America are sweltering under a ‘fierce’ heatwave – and it’s the middle of winter (CNN)
Both of the planet’s poles experience extreme heat, and Antarctica breaks records (NPR)
Greenhouse gases continued to increase rapidly in 2022 (NOAA)
World of Change: Global Temperatures (NASA)
What are El Nino and La Nina? (NOAA)
Aerosols: Small Particles with Big Climate Effects (NASA)
The heat index reached 152 degrees in the Middle East — nearly at the limit for human survival (Washington Post)
Basics of Climate Change (EPA)
Exxon scientists predicted global warming with ‘shocking skill and accuracy,’ Harvard researchers say (Harvard Gazette)
Global warming: World on track to breach 1.5 degrees of warming in the next 5 years (CNN)
Mount Graham Red Squirrel (Arizona State University)
The effort to restore Joshua trees after Mojave wildfire faces grim odds (NPR)
Panama Canal water levels at historic lows, restrictions to remain (Reuters)
‘Receding before our eyes’: Island glaciers likely to be all gone by mid-century (Victoria Times-Colonist)
World’s biggest permafrost crater growing, as Earth warms (EarthSky)
Siberia permafrost yields well-preserved ice age woolly rhino (The Guardian)
Viruses in permafrost: Scientists have revived a ‘zombie’ virus that spent 48,500 years frozen (CNN)
A worm that survived 46,000 years in permafrost wows scientists (NPR)
How is the current global warming trend different from previous warming periods in Earth’s history? (Climate.gov)
What is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)? (NOAA)
Reconstruction of Major North Atlantic Circulation System Shows Weakening (NOAA)
PDF: GLOBAL CLIMATIC IMPACTS OF A COLLAPSE OF THE ATLANTIC THERMOHALINE CIRCULATION (Harvard University)
Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Nature Communications)
Renewable Energy Costs Have Dropped Much Faster Than Expected, But There’s A Catch (Forbes)
Transcript
Transcriptions provided by GMR Transcription Services
Fraser Cain: Astronomy Cast, Episode 689: Our Warming World, 20 Years of Climate Science. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, your weekly facts-based journey to the cosmos. Where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of Cosmo Quest. Hey Pamela, welcome back.
Dr. Pamela Gay: It has been a summer and it’s good to be entering pumpkin spice latte season which means Astronomy Cast is back.
Fraser Cain: What season is this, 16?
Dr. Pamela Gay: Seventeen.
Fraser Cain: Seventeen. All right. I’ll have to take your word for it.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, last year we were old enough to drive. This year we’re just at that frustrating age where you’re not quite an adult but you have your driver’s license.
Fraser Cain: Right. So, before we get into it, I want to thank you for giving me my astronomy education. I was – I did an interview with Ethan Siegel on my podcast and it’s gonna be coming out tomorrow for all the patrons. And Ethan Siegel, Paul Sutter, Brian Koberlein, they are like my force ghosts who, mentors, who watch over me. And they slap my wrists every time I make a mistake and badly explain constant, and cosmology, and astronomy. But behind the scenes, sort of educating me this entire way is you. And when you sort of look back to what I knew 17 years ago to what I know now and how much of a better science communicator I’ve become, a lot of that is thanks to you. So, thank you very much for giving me this education. I’m assuming my PhD is in the mail but thank you.
Dr. Pamela Gay: I keep trying to figure out the honorary degree thing. One of these days, one of these days I’m gonna figure it out.
Fraser Cain: As soon as Cosmo Quest gets certified in some way and then I’m applying, ‘cause I feel I’ve put in my time.
Dr. Pamela Gay: You have. It’s really amazing.
Fraser Cain: It’s official. June, July we’re the warmest we’ve seen since records began over a century ago. Fires are rampant across Canada and we’re seeing record droughts around the world. Today we’re gonna look at 20 years of climate science. How well does the reality match up with the predictions? So, how did 2023 summer affect the climate change affect you?
Dr. Pamela Gay: So, I have to admit normally I live outside in May. Usually, it starts to get warm at the end of April, May is outside bark mulching, getting thing planted, everything is all set, and then it’s hot to the point that I only go outside to water things after that. But we’ll usually only get maybe two or three weeks that are in the high 30s here, and maybe another two weeks in the low 30s. So, it’s usually not terrible, it’s just unpleasant.
Well, this year I don’t know where spring went because May was hot. And this is the first year ever I was just like, “I’m not even gonna try with the garden. The yard is on its own.” There’s a tropical rainforest out there now. And it was just too hot to even consider going camping or any of the normal things I’d want to do. What about you?
Fraser Cain: So, I live in a temperate rainforest. Rain being sort of one of the operative words. The summers are dry, I think. But it has rained four times since April.
Dr. Pamela Gay: That’s not normal.
Fraser Cain: That’s not normal, no. And the total amount of rain is three centimeters of rain. So, one inch of rain in April, May, June, July, August, September, six months.
Dr. Pamela Gay: We got it here. We got all your rain, all of it here.
Fraser Cain: Good. I was wondering where our rain went. So, it’s just been astoundingly dry. And last winter was astoundingly dry, too. And then of course the big problem is the fires. My province is on fire. My country is on fire. And many people listening who live in the US, you experience the smoke but it’s just – at one point we were at 17 times as much fire in British Columbia as the national average – as the historic average, which is bonkers.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: And so, every day is smoke here. Just day after day after day for months on end now. You go outside, you’re breathing smoke. The hills are blue with smoke, smoke everywhere. Yeah, it’s been rough.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And are you finding this affecting your weather forecasting? Here they can no longer forecast the weather. There was one day where it violently alternated between, you’re going to die by tornado and thunderstorm to it’s just going to be clear. And they couldn’t decide, ‘cause they didn’t know how the storm was gonna turn. Turned out we were cloudy with no thunder, rain, or anything that day. But we used to be able to trust the weatherman at least a little bit.
Fraser Cain: Well, my weather app, it’s just 10 days of sunshine. Just day after day after day of sun. So, yeah, it’s been quite predictable. And if you look at it now, you don’t necessarily want to have every day be a rainy day, but you look at it and you’re just like, “Aw another 10 days of clear skies.” You’re seeing trees die and you’re seeing the rivers dry up, wildlife is stressed. It’s – so, no, our weather has been, our short-term weather has perfectly predictable. Drought, and more of it. So, now weather and climate are not necessarily the same thing.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Right.
Fraser Cain: And of course, we are here talking about our anecdotal experiences of extreme weather events. And that does not necessarily match what the climate predictions say. But we have had decades of climate science at this point tell us what the future holds. And I think this summer it came home for a lot of people that suddenly it was always this nebulous future that we were sort of anticipating and sort of thinking about how we were gonna cope. And now a lot of people are having to figure how they’re gonna cope in their daily lives. So, what have we learned in these last 20 years of climate science?
Dr. Pamela Gay: What we have primarily learned is our greatest fears underestimated how bad it could get. And that is something that really came home to a lot of people these past few months because while it was summer here in North America, in South America it was supposed to be the dead of winter. Except they were having temperatures that were roughly 100 degrees Fahrenheit, well over 30 degrees Celsius. And they were hitting in many places the highest temperatures ever recorded, not for just that day of the year, but like ever. And what we’re realizing –
Fraser Cain: In the middle of winter.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, in the middle of winter. And what we’re realizing is we had predicted that weather would be more extreme, we had predicted that with the poles no longer as cold as they were it would destabilize weather patterns. And all of that is true. But we had failed to see how in the details there would be enhanced release of greenhouse gases as different parts of the world warmed up. And this is something we just weren’t prepared for.
And so, instead of saying, “Well we’re probably going to see the average temperature of the entire planet 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050,” it now looks like it’s going to happen at some point within the next five years. And may have already happened we’re waiting to see this month’s information. But for the past few months, global average temperatures have been 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
Fraser Cain: I’d heard it’s – right now we’re at 1.2.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Okay.
Fraser Cain: If we follow the trend lines, we’re at 1.2, but this summer has been unusually hot and it’s an El Niño year.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: We’re seeing actually a decrease in aerosols that have helped – that were sort of helping push down temperatures. So, here we are.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. And the difference between an average increase in climate and a localized weather increase is – what we’re gonna see is extremes. Where the overall increase in heating is going to exceed the places where temperatures go down. So, there will be places that have significantly harsher winters. There will be places that see calmer summers, there will be those few places where temperatures do go down.
What we’re talking about, however, is that average. And when you start to see places where the daytime temperature’s the same temperature as a rare steak, it’s bad. And in some parts of Southeast Asia and the Middle East they saw temperatures where the thermometer read the same number that a chef’s thermometer should read for a rare steak.
Fraser Cain: All right we’re gonna talk about this again in a second, but it’s time for another break.
Dr. Pamela Gay: This episode of Astronomy Cast is sponsored by Better Help. Is your brain most annoying when you tell it that it’s time for bed? Do you find yourself snuggling into your pillow getting nice and comfy, only to have your brain start worst casing the fate of the universe, reminding you of things you might have said differently, or just being shouty about all the things on your to do list. If this happens to you, you are not alone. My brain pulls these same shenanigans. There are lots of things out there that claim they can help from white noise machines to supplements.
You can spend money on a lot of stopgap measures but if you want to find real peace, it really helps to talk through your thoughts while getting therapy. If you’re thinking of starting therapy, give Better Help a try. It’s entire landline. The mobile friendly website will have you fill out a brief questionnaire and pair you with someone who will match your needs. And if they aren’t a perfect fit, you easily change therapists at any time. Everything is online. And Beter Help is convenient, flexible, and can work with any schedule. Even an astronomer’s schedule like mine. Get a break from your thoughts with Better Help. Visit betterhelp.com/astronomy today to get 10% off your first month. That’s Better Help, H-E-L-P, dot com, slash astronomy.
Fraser Cain: And we’re back. I mean the basics of climate change from a physics perspective were calculated 150 years ago.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: And you know how much carbon dioxide – if you put additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere then you know how much it’s going to raise the temperatures by. And then you – we know that most of the carbon dioxide absorption and heat absorption is done by the ocean. So, you add that physics, which has been known for 100 years. You get the numbers.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: And the studies you think about Exxon Mobil had predicted climate change back in the 1970s. And we’re following exactly the predictions that they made. At a large scale, total planetary wide you can make these calculations on the back of an envelope with a handheld calculator and be pretty right on. The issue is what does it mean for specific places?
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: I think that was what you were getting at before the break. That we know if you took the whole planet as one number you could predict that very easily. But what does it mean for the coast of South America? What does it mean for Central Australia? What does it mean for the Arctic during September? These are the questions that are of practical use to the people who are trying to prepare, and this is where the uncertainties still lie.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And to give you some numbers on this, what we’re looking at is with a 1.5-degree temperature increase, we’re going to see 19 extra days per year of extreme heat in any given location. So, where I’m used to having those two weeks of extreme heat, it’s now going to be four and a half weeks. If we get to two degrees that goes up to 29 days of extreme heat which starts to affect our ability to have construction projects to farm. And it also starts to get to the point of well our oceans are going to rise both from the excess water going into them from melting ice and also from thermal expansion.
So, at 1.5 degrees it’s a 48 centimeter. So, about that much, 48-centimeter increase. But at two degrees it’s 56 centimeters. So, we’re starting to lose our coasts. This is particularly noticeable in places like Louisiana and Florida where you have a lot of marshes and swamps and areas that are right at the edge of being above and below sea level. Well, you move sea level just a little bit and now all those acreages are underwater.
And all of this turns into habitat loss. So, if you have a mountain peak that has some rare squirrel on it, they have those in Arizona. And that mountain is no longer habitable, the squirrel will probably be fine, but there are different plants, there are different birds, there are a variety of different animals where if the top of the mountain no longer has the same climate, they can’t necessarily get to the mountain 100 miles north is correct.
There was a massive fire this summer in Joshua Tree National Park. And Joshua Trees are one of the plants that can’t exactly get up and walk northward. And it’s getting too hot where they are. And they require just the right combination of weather, sunlight, moisture and lack thereof. and altitude. And they can’t just skip over a bunch of landscape that is inhospitable to get where they are good. And it turns out Joshua Trees aren’t something you can just plant.
Fraser Cain: And when you match up the – our civilization, cities, roads, farms, these are walls that nature can’t migrate past. And so, they run up against a bunch of farmland and they can’t move any further north.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Right.
Fraser Cain: And so, we don’t have an infrastructure that is built to allow for these changing temperatures. And same thing with the coastal regions. If nobody was living on the coast of Florida, then losing the coast of Florida wouldn’t necessarily be that big of a problem. It would happen slowly. You would have where the beach line begins and ends, is a thing that changes throughout – it’s human history.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Right.
Fraser Cain: Throughout millennia, right? When you look at the location of the Mississippi, it’s squirming around.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: But it’s because we want to live there.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. And so, we start looking at cities like Miami, New Orleans, Venice. The Panama Canal this summer for us, it’s the equator. S o, it’s not that big of a seasonal difference for Panama. But they ran into problems ‘cause they didn’t have enough water to get boats through the Panama Canal.
Fraser Cain: Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: We talk about the glacier. We have a glacier here in my city. And it’s sort of the iconic picture of Courtenay in Comox. And so any – they use it as an icon. We have this cool kind of flat-topped mountain with this giant glacier. And I’ve never seen the glacier so small. It’s thawed and it’s going to be gone in a couple of years. It’s been here for thousands of years. You look and you say maybe two or three years, maybe five, ten years at the most and then it’ll be gone. Every summer they’ll be this rocky plateau above the city and not the snow right in the middle of summer. Which is too bad. So, is there any good news? Is there anything that maybe isn’t as bad as we were anticipating?
Dr. Pamela Gay: No.
Fraser Cain: Okay.
Dr. Pamela Gay: But there are some things that are much more interesting than we could’ve anticipated.
Fraser Cain: Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So, there is at least wow, that’s geologically cool. I kinda wish I didn’t live to see that. But my favorite of these and I’m probably gonna mispronounce this ‘cause I haven’t found it written out in Cyrillic. There is Batagaika crater in Siberia, which is an area of what used to be permafrost or tundra, that has to begun to melt and the ices and gasses that were frozen underneath are just going away into the atmosphere. And the land is literally unzipping as this crater gets 10 meters larger per year.
They’re not really letting scientists go in because it’s too dangerous of a landscape right now. But they’ve sent drones in, and it is literally exposing millennia of sedimentary layers that have never been seen before that researchers are of course extremely excited about. But in the process, it’s also unlocking viruses, bones, carcasses, from the past. In Siberia there’s currently this great new age of collecting up dead things that were well preserved in the ice. Baby lions, or cave lions as the case may be, baby Siberian this, that, or the other thing. Baby mammoths. All of these things are coming up beautifully well-preserved, increasing the chance that geneticists are gonna find out how to bring back some of these animals.
Since humans put the mammoths out of existence, I’m kinda okay with bringing them back. Get the rhinos first, though. So, it’s this cool age for people studying recently deceased species. But also, a terrifying time when you start thinking about small pox and other viruses that are in cemeteries that are now thawing out for the first time. And researchers sometimes do things without thinking through whether they should do things. And there was a paper that came out this summer on how a more than 10,000-year-old ringworm was brought back into live existence after being thawed and treated correctly. I’m not sure how I feel about ancient ringworms coming back into existence.
Fraser Cain: Right. I was talking to a biologist at a pub here. And he had been making expeditions up to the glacier that I mentioned because it’s showing all of this new terrain that’s now being colonized by the plants. And he was discovering new kinds of insects.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Oh wow.
Fraser Cain: And even this glacial rock intertidal zone, I don’t know what the term is, but interglacial zone. Anyway, so there’s various kinds of little critters that live on the moss, and lichens, and stuff that are revealed. And this is the chance to see it. Okay, you know what, I think, let’s just keep going. There’s no sugar coating this episode. What else do you – what other, you’re holding a little book of sadness.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: What notes have you got in your little book of sadness that maybe we should talk about before we run out of time?
Dr. Pamela Gay: So, I – one of the biggest problems that we’re dealing with is there’s no ancient analog for what we’re going into. We have a few pieces of historic data from times when the planet was warmer, but it was usually warmer for reasons other than greenhouse gases completely filling the atmosphere. And so, we’re going back all over the planet. Researchers are going through the sedimentary records trying to figure out okay, when was the last time that everything thawed out? What was this part of the planet like?
And it’s kinda creepy how much things are starting to match. Where you lived actually used to be a desert. And the American Southwest, like the LA basin, that area that is now a dessert used to be tropical and they’re sure getting a lot more rain. So, we see some hints that weather patterns that we’ve seen in the past will come back. But other things just aren’t going to match up.
One of the things that really struck me was back in 2002 there was a issue of the journal Nature that had an article about the 10,000 year history of the tidal cycle, current cycle in the Atlantic. How due to the differences in temperature and salinity at different levels in the water, we see hot water from the equatorial regions going northward England, we see deeper levels of the colder water coming back. And this cycle, first of all, allows a lot of the shipping routes that we enjoy. But it also is the reason that Calgary and London are the same amount of northwards. And Calgary isn’t exactly someplace you would plant a palm tree. But there are actually palm trees in London. And they’re mostly happy there.
So, if we lose this ocean circulation, places that are heated by warm equatorial waters are suddenly going to get significantly colder. And there was a paper that came out this summer that sited that paper that I remember reading back in 2002, and it was like, “Okay, folks this is happening right now. We are in the process of this thing shutting down.” And –
Fraser Cain: In between five and 80 years, or something like that.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Right. And five and 80 years puts the probability that it happens in our lifetime pretty high and there’s certain stories, I’m not sure I wanna know how they end.
Fraser Cain: Right. Yeah, when you go to Iceland in midwinter.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: Above the Arctic Circle –
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: And you’re like, “Why isn’t this place colder?”
Dr. Pamela Gay: Right.
Fraser Cain: That’s this current system that runs right past Iceland and then sort of moves into the North Atlantic. It’s amazing.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. And if that goes away, we’re looking at basically a new form of glaciation and ice coming from the north southward, at least in Northern Europe. Now there’s different currents and different oceans. You still need to see how all these things come together. And like I said, we don’t have a historic analog for what we’re experiencing. There was another summary article in 2003 on climate change that was kind of what caused my friends to take all climate change journals away from me for about 20 years. And –
Fraser Cain: And you just got them back today.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Right, exactly. And in this particular issue there was a woman that pointed out that things will always find a stable point. And what we’ve seen throughout our planet’s history is a variety of different stable points that the planet returns to over and over again. But when you change the variables enough, you end up finding a new normal, a new stable point that isn’t defined by past experience. And our planet is in the process of hopefully finding that new stable point. And until it does that and we have enough time to observe, our weather models aren’t going to be able to predict things that could have a few years ago. Until then, our understanding of so many things. When will that glacier go away? Will it actually end up growing? All of these different things are a giant we don’t know.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. I think you had no good news. I want to give some good news.
Dr. Pamela Gay: All right.
Fraser Cain: Which is that – the good news that the cost of creating and implementing renewable energy solutions is dropping precipitously faster than anybody ever expected. And so, when it would have required legislation, would have additional taxes, things like that. Now it just seems like you have to hate money if you choose to do anything other than Solar Voltaics and wind farms. That the prices have come down so dramatically that a lot of the future shift away from fossil fuels into renewables is just locked in and inevitable.
And a lot of those targets that were people really frightened about hitting two degrees centigrade, five degrees centigrade if we just didn’t decrease – like they’re literally impossible unless you’ve got people who are just I’m gonna burn coal because I hate the world. Like everybody else is gonna make financial situations and give us all power. ‘Cause that’s the one that make sense. And so, the – in the latest IPCC documents, they just say we’re gonna hit – we hit these costs way sooner than anybody anticipated. That that is gonna to have an enormous on what the future holds for our emissions.
Things like hitting net zero by 2050 is not an impossible goal. And in many cases is sort of now the glidepath that we’re just headed towards naturally. And that there are going to be, over the next couple of decades to 25 years when we do this show, we’re gonna have the big bang consequences for what has come before. But we will hit a point where we are no longer putting additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And we will then reach our new set point.
And I think the goal for people now is how do we limit those emissions? How do we bring them into the negative? How do we make that new set point be closer to us? To what we we’re accustomed to, where we built all our cities, where we – how we are irrigate our crops, how wildlife moves through corridors. All of these things, the sooner we can stop the rise, then the better we’re gonna be able to enjoy the world that we grew up in. And I think that’s something that we all would prefer. That there’s only the amount of hurricanes and forest fires that our infrastructure is prepared for.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Right. And only of the categories we’re prepared for.
Fraser Cain: Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay: No more of these category fives please.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. And so, I think it’s really important one, somebody take away Pamela’s journal, two, that people don’t feel hopeless that the winds are all moving in the right direction at this point. They’re hotter, but they’re moving in the right direction. And that it does require continued voting with your money and with your – but I think that there’s so many reasons to be hopeful, that it’s gonna come. And I personally find it fun. I find it exciting to implement these kinds of changes, that when you have a home that is off grid, which I’m hoping to build, that’s so cool. Right?
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: That – I collect solar power during the day. I have batteries at night. That if the power goes off, oh it doesn’t matter go me anymore. I charge my electric car, I don’t go to the gas station anymore. This is all great. And it’s weird to me that people don’t find these kinds of solutions as exciting as I do. And that it’s sad to me that it’s all so charged with political posturing when –
Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, it really is also another one of the things that I think is affecting different income levels very differently.
Fraser Cain: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And –
Fraser Cain: The ones that are least equipped are the ones suffering the most.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Exactly. One of the things that I was reading about yesterday is the city of Phoenix this summer, it was getting so hot during the day that overnight the sidewalks weren’t able to cool off down to their neutral temperature. So, at the end of each day the temperature of the sidewalks was a little bit hotter, a little bit hotter, a little bit hotter. And that affects people who are unhoused. It affects people who work outside. It affects a different population of people, but the people who are suffering aren’t the ones that can afford electric cars.
And when we start seeing these disparities in how you can address the future, it’s a lot bleaker. And this week the G20 didn’t include climate change in their declaration of things that they’re working on. And we aren’t going to hit the goals that Paris Climate Agreement. But I can hope that the used electric car market in the next few years will start to allow things to maybe trickle down a little bit. That the future that you describe is going to be open through some sort of means to people who can’t necessarily afford the battery infrastructure on their own. That perhaps it’s starts to be the kind of thing where you get them and pay for them the way you’d normally pay your electric bill.
There’s so many ways that we can future you describe real. It just takes resources. And it takes the decision to change the world. And I hope that decision gets made.
Fraser Cain: Same, That’s – and we can, I think about that future –
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: Where we have a return to nature, where we have a ton of diversity in our forests and our wildlife.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Mm-hmm.
Fraser Cain: That we live in balance on this planet.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: And I find that really exciting. I find that really thrilling and then it makes me think what does the long-term future for humanity look like? We have to figure this out eventually.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: And it’s an interesting challenge and one that I hope we’re ready for. And on that note, we should wrap this up. Thank you, Pamela.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Thank you, Fraser. And I don’t have the names pulled up this week because I want to take a moment and say I can start reading your name next week if you join our Patreon. If you want to hear this show ad-free every time, we have a feed set up for anyone who joins our Patreon for $1 a week or higher. And we just want to create content and if I can get rid of ads forever, I would. But that means all of you need to join our Patreon at that at least $1 a month level. So, go forth. Consider the Patreon and we will see you next week and hopefully start reading names.
Fraser Cain: Thanks everyone.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Bye bye. Astronomy Cast is a joint product of the Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Comments attribution license. So, love it, share it, and remix it. But please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, Astronomycast.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep this show going, please consider joining our community at Pateron.com/AstronomyCast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox. And invites to online events.
We’re so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast.