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RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: From MIT'S Office of Digital Learning,
this is Climate Conversations by ClimateX.
I'm your host, Rajesh Kasturirangan.
Welcome to Climate Conversations.
I'm Rajesh Kasturirangan, and I'm here in MIT's Office
of Digital Learning with two of my colleagues, Dave Damm-Luhr--
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: Hey.
So glad to be here.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: And Laura Howells.
LAURA HOWELLS: Hi, everyone.
So what have you been reading about, Rajesh?
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Well, do you want
the good news or the bad news?
LAURA HOWELLS: Well, we're a climate change podcast,
so let's go for the bad news.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Well, no shortage of that.
So I was reading this paper.
This was an article in The Ecologist
where they're talking about what might happen in Bangladesh.
And based on the current population estimates,
which might increase a lot by the end of the century,
30 million people will lose their lands
if sea level rise is a meter or higher, which is what we expect
by the end of the century.
So that's 30--
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: At least.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Yes, at least.
LAURA HOWELLS: And are there adaptation plans
in place or the finances to support any kind of adaptation?
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So the article
does interview people in Bangladesh
who have been tasked with that particular problem.
LAURA HOWELLS: I wouldn't want to be given that problem.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Exactly.
But 30 million people--
I frankly think that it's hard to plan for that kind of stuff,
even in countries where you have plenty of resources.
LAURA HOWELLS: It's hard to even conceptualize.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: But that's the kind of saddening news.
Because these are low-lying areas and islands and places
that are vanishing under the ocean.
LAURA HOWELLS: Well, today we're going
to be talking with someone who's thinking
about these kind of problems.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Yeah.
We have Professor David McGee, who
will be telling us both about the history of the climate
and the work that he's doing with very talented students
on how to address major climate challenges,
including in Bangladesh.
But I think that we all have to face these challenges,
and not just David McGee's students.
LAURA HOWELLS: Yeah, absolutely.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So if you have any thoughts on how
to do it, please contact us.
LAURA HOWELLS: Let's take a listen.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So we're so
happy to have Professor David McGee, who
is an associate professor in the Department of Earth
and Planetary Sciences at MIT, where he researches
paleoclimatology, a term that I have
to say three times before I even can pronounce it.
But we are so happy to have you.
And he's also the director of the Terrascope program, which
is a wonderful undergraduate learning experience here
in MIT.
David-- and since there are multiple Davids here,
we'll call David McGee David, and we'll
call David Damm-Luhr as Dave.
So David, tell us how you became a paleoclimatologist
and what you do.
DAVID MCGEE: Yeah.
I thought that it was all an accident that I just ended up
doing this.
And then I started to go through boxes in my parents' house,
clearing out old stuff, and realized
that it's been a little bit more linear than I thought.
So I found a story that I'd written in first grade
about a time machine that took people back to the Archean
four billion years ago.
So something captured my imagination really
early on about times that we can't directly
observe, that we don't have any written record of,
when the Earth was dramatically different than it is today,
and about the basic fact that the Earth we
look around and see around us today is what it is,
but it's different than the Earth
was a few million years ago.
It's different than the Earth will be in a few million years.
The Earth is in this constant state of evolution.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Wait.
I thought that the Earth started 4,000 years ago.
DAVID MCGEE: Right.
It's much better job security for me
to have another billion years or a few billion years to look at.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Where does the clock start for you?
DAVID MCGEE: The whole of Earth history
is interesting to look at.
And there's a huge amount of climate history
that we can learn from.
My research focuses specifically on the last,
say, half million years of Earth history.
And this is a time period where the Earth has been swinging
in and out of ice ages about every 100,000 years,
going back and forth between ice ages--
the most recent one being about 20,000 years ago--
to warm periods like today.
And the reason for focusing on that time period--
one of the reasons is simply that there's a better record.
It's more recent, and so there's just more materials
to study, more sediments, more other deposits to study,
like ice cores.
And so we can get a richer picture
of what the climate was like in this more recent part
of Earth's history.
The other reason is that the tools I
use are best suited for the last half million years.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: I have so many questions in response
to that.
Question number one-- is this oscillation cycle
of ice age and back to warming typical of the last, say,
500 million years?
Or is there something special in the last half million?
DAVID MCGEE: That's a great question.
So one of the things we see really quickly looking
at the rock record is that the paleoclimate record--
that is the record of the long history of Earth's climate--
is really well-suited to teach us about times
where Earth's climate was warmer than present.
And that's because for most of the last half billion years,
500 million years, the Earth has been warmer than present.
It's had less ice.
Sea levels have been higher.
Temperatures have been higher.
CO2 has been higher, all for natural reasons.
And over the last, say, 30 million years, the Earth
has been cooling not in a constant rate,
but has gradually been cooling.
More ice has been building up.
And the last 3 million years, that cooling has continued.
And on top of that cooling, the climate
has gotten more variable.
So these swings between ice ages and warm periods
are a somewhat unusual part of Earth's climate history.
And that makes it particularly fascinating to study.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So kind of a geek question alert here.
Is that a kind of damped oscillation?
DAVID MCGEE: Yeah so we understand that these ice age
cycles are triggered by periodic changes in Earth's orbit
that change how much sunlight is reaching
the high latitudes in summer.
Because that's what matters to an ice sheet,
is how much does it melt during the summer.
And so because there is these slow changes in Earth's orbit
that change, basically, how much sunlight is reaching northern
Canada and Greenland during a local summer,
that causes ice sheets to naturally grow and decay.
What we also understand is that these periodic changes
in Earth's orbit that have time scales of between 20,000
and 100,000 years are not sufficient to produce the ice
age cycles that we've seen.
They need what we call amplifiers,
things to make them larger than they otherwise would be.
And so what we now understand is that that carbon cycle--
that is, movements of carbon from the deep ocean
into the atmosphere to cause atmospheric CO2 levels to rise
and fall--
are what provides the amplification that's
necessary to move the Earth between these climate states.
One thing that we don't really understand
is why the climate states seem to be fairly stable.
That is, we move between them, but most
of the warm periods of the last million years
have been roughly about the same temperature and CO2 level.
Most of the cold periods of the last million years
have been about the same amount of ice growth
and about the same CO2 level.
And so there is some suggestion that there
are quasi-stable states that the climate is
moving back and forth between.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: So one of the things that I'm curious about
is is the globe-- is the entire Earth your field of study?
Or when you talk about ice ages or going back and forth
between warm and cold periods, are those localized?
Or how do you study in terms of the globe
versus some part of the globe?
DAVID MCGEE: So some properties of past climate
are global, like CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
Or of course, mean global temperature, by definition,
is global.
And so during ice ages, yes, the whole Earth gets colder.
What I focus on, though, is not so much the global picture,
but how these past climate changes have affected
precipitation patterns.
And by focusing on precipitation,
that inherently brings you down to regional scales.
So for example, asking when we've had these past climate
changes, how and why has precipitation
changed in the American Southwest.
And do we understand the magnitude of those changes?
Or for example, in North Africa, the Sahara Desert--
has the Sahara Desert been equally dry
throughout the last few million years
as these ice age cycles have come and gone
and as other changes have happened in Earth's climate?
Or have there have been dramatic fluctuations in how dry
the Sahara is or how dry the tropics are
or wet the tropics are?
LAURA HOWELLS: I'm interested--
I know you're talking about some,
obviously, very complex measurements.
And you mentioned one of the reasons you really
liked studying the last half a million
years is because of some of the tools you can use.
I'd be really interested to know what
those tools are, what they allow you to measure and study,
and how.
DAVID MCGEE: Sure.
So we look at several different archives of past climates.
So these are all natural deposits that form.
And as they form, they encode information
about the climate around them.
So one that's especially easy to understand
might be a tree ring.
As a tree ring grows in a year in which the tree has
enough water and temperatures that favor growth,
that's going to be a fairly broad ring.
The tree will be able to put on a lot of wood during that year.
During a year when the tree is stressed, either because
of drought or because of a cold summer,
depending on where it's living, it will put on a thin ring.
And so you can go back in time.
And if you take samples from many, many different trees
to filter out the noise of individual tree's life
histories, you can start to reconstruct
dry periods and wet periods in places where trees are mostly
stressed by drought or warm periods and cold periods
in places where trees are mostly stressed
by summer temperatures.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: So if you don't study trees,
what is it you study?
And how do you pick your field sites?
Because obviously, you want to get data that maybe will
supplement your prior research.
DAVID MCGEE: That's right.
So the easiest type of deposit to understand that we study
is ancient lake shorelines.
So in many areas of the world--
for example, Nevada and Utah in the American West--
lake basins are hydrologically closed.
That is, there is no river outlet.
The lake just fills up and loses water by evaporation.
That makes them fairly simple systems.
It's like filling a bathtub.
And as rain falls, it fills up the basin.
And then, of course, you lose that water by evaporation.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: It is kind of like tree rings, right?
Because more water, bigger lake.
DAVID MCGEE: That's right.
That's right.
And it produces rings.
It produces rings around--
essentially bathtub rings around the sides of the basin.
And so all throughout the American West, around
what are either now dry basins today or small lakes,
like the Great Salt Lake or Pyramid Lake or Mono Lake,
there are bathtub rings providing
records of much larger lakes in the past.
So for example, the Great Salt Lake
is a remnant of a lake that used to be
the size of modern-day Lake Michigan
about 16,000 years ago.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Oh, that recent?
DAVID MCGEE: Yeah.
So not that-- this is just before we think
people started arriving in this area of the world.
The first humans to come into Utah,
if the current dating is correct,
around 13,000 years ago would have seen a much larger lake
than we see today.
So this evidence of these dramatically different
precipitation patterns that these lakes provide
gives us a natural experiment to explore
what is it in the climate system that can make the American
West so wet.
And do we understand what these mechanisms are
that lead to dramatic changes in how wet or dry
the American West is?
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: So what are your theories?
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Yeah, exactly.
DAVID MCGEE: So one of the big things
that matters is these ice sheets that
have occurred throughout the last half million years.
So just putting a really big ice sheet on Canada,
as we had 20,000 years ago, diverts
the same storms that today hit the Pacific Northwest
and make it quite wet, and pushes them further south
simply because of the topographic effect
of a several-kilometer-high ice sheet.
It's like putting a mountain range there.
But there's other things that are important as well.
And so one of the things that we're just starting to uncover
is a relationship between essentially
the relative heating between the two hemispheres.
So when the Northern Hemisphere is slightly cooler relative
to the Southern Hemisphere, this basically pushes
all of those storm tracks even further south
and leads to the wettest conditions that
have been seen in the American West in the past, say,
several hundred thousand years.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So tell us a piece of evidence
that you had not expected to be useful for your purposes, so
something that's not as obvious as bathtub rings or tree rings.
DAVID MCGEE: So yeah, the lake shorelines
are particularly obvious and easy to understand.
And I should make clear that the particular thing that we
do in my lab is to date those shorelines as precisely as we
can using uranium and thorium isotopes.
And by dating them very precisely,
we can then link them to other deposits
around the world that have also been precisely
dated to start to produce maps of past precipitation patterns.
So we're not just looking at one place in isolation,
but we're putting that in the context of as many other places
on the planet as we can.
So we start to map out, well, where were the dry zones.
Where were the wet zones?
Where were winter storms going?
Where were the deserts at different times
in Earth history?
And that depends upon accurate dating.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: And is that now
available for a lot of the Earth?
DAVID MCGEE: Yes.
We're starting to build much richer datasets.
One of the ways in which these maps are useful
is that we can use them to see how the same climate
models that are used to project what changes are expected
in the future behave when you take them
outside of their comfort zones.
That is, all of these climate models
are simplifications of the actual climate system.
And they've been tuned or developed
to reproduce the patterns and the variability
of the 20th century, the only time period in Earth's history
where we have a good network of instrumental data,
direct observations.
And that's great.
These are robust models, and they
produce relatively consistent projections for the future.
But going forward, we're starting to push the climate.
We're already pushing the climate outside
of the range of variability that has been
observed in the 20th century.
And so the question arises--
do the same tunings and parameterizations,
the simplifications that worked in the 20th century--
will they work in the 21st?
Will we get accurate projections of where we're going?
And so one way to provide an independent test of climate
model performance is to go back to the paleoclimate record.
I want to make clear that none of these paleoclimates
are analogies to where we're going.
We don't view any of them as saying, OK,
because this happened x thousand years ago, y
is going to happen in 2,100 But what they do provide
is that time when the climate system has
been kicked by something different than the 20th century
and moved to a different enough state
that it's an independent test of whether the climate models can
match what the paleoclimate evidence is.
And so we will take the same climate models
that are used to project the future,
give them the conditions of some time slice in the past,
say 6,000 years ago, and then run the climate
models under those conditions and then compare them
to these dense networks of paleo data
to see whether they reproduce what the paleo data say.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: It reminds me a lot of what
machine learning people do.
Because they will take a test data set but then set aside
some of that.
So they will create a model on the basis of a subset.
And of course, before you predict
what might happen in the future, you
want to see if your model does well
on the remainder of the test data.
DAVID MCGEE: That's right.
And the problem with the climate data we have now
is that a lot of variability in the climate system
is on timescales of 50 and 100 years.
And if you only have 100 years of data,
it's hard to know whether you're capturing
that longer-term variability.
So for example, tree ring records from the American West
would suggest that in climates not so different from today,
there have been century scale droughts that
are bigger than anything that we've seen in the last century.
And so we don't-- we're still working to figure out what
caused those droughts.
But they're a reminder that we might not have seen--
we certainly haven't seen all of the variability that
exists in the climate system, and we haven't been
able to directly observe it.
And because we don't have written records of climate
everywhere in the world before, say, 100 years ago,
we need to go out and use these sometimes complicated
but important natural archives to reconstruct what
climate was like in the past.
You asked something about other pieces of data and surprises.
So some of the other archives that we work with
are stalagmites from caves and deep sea sediments.
And each records a different part of the climate system
and also has its own blind spots and strengths.
And so one of the things we try to do in my lab
is develop climate records using many archives,
compare them to data that other labs have produced with still
other archives, and produce as rich a picture of past climates
as we can.
We don't take any of these lines of evidence
as the be all and end all because each
is a natural system that's reacting
to many different things.
Even the lakes that I talked about before--
of course a lake size is dependent upon how much
rain falls.
But it's also dependent upon how much evaporation there
is, how strong winds are, and whether there's
ice covering the lake in the winter,
and other complications.
And so what we look for is consistency
between multiple lines of evidence.
And when there is disagreement, then we
need to go burrow in and try to understand
these natural systems better to reconstruct past climates.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: So I'm trying to channel some of our listeners.
We have quite a broad audience out there
listening to this podcast.
So I'm wondering-- one of the questions
that those folks might ask would be, OK, so
Professor McGee, tell me how all this research could inform
the problems that we're facing today and the questions
that we're asking ourselves.
How on Earth do we grapple with this climate change?
DAVID MCGEE: I think there's a specific answer to that
and a more general answer.
And the more general answer is that the paleoclimate record
provides clear evidence that when the climate system is
forced, when it's pushed by something--
whether it's greenhouse gases or changes in the Earth's orbit,
volcanism--
it reacts.
And the precipitation patterns have the ability
to change rather dramatically compared to what we're used to.
6,000 years ago, the Sahara Desert didn't exist.
It was basically a grassland with hippopotamuses
and giraffes and people living there.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: Hard to imagine.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: And of course,
the evidence of Lake Bonneville, this lake that
filled the Great Salt Lake basin to the size of Lake Michigan.
So these changes are very recent in Earth's history,
and at CO2 levels that are not that
different from the levels that existed
in the pre-industrial climate.
And they suggest that the climate system response is not
a stable system.
So my concern going forward is that we
have infrastructure and societies that
are built around the climate of the last 100 years.
Our bridges, our ports, our highways, our farming systems,
our irrigation is built around what
we've come to expect over the last 100 years.
And there's nothing sacred or special
about the particular climate in which we live.
But we're used to it, and we've built around it.
And so as we move forward and change the climate,
my real concern is that it's going
to be a fundamental and profoundly far-reaching
destabilizing influence.
And it's going to make it harder to achieve
all the other goals that we'd like to achieve this century--
preserving parts of the biosphere,
bringing people out of poverty, et cetera,
by destabilizing the natural systems
that we've come to depend upon.
LAURA HOWELLS: Have you found that this being an increasing
political interest in the research you do-- how do you
find it communicating what you study with the world at large
and the politics at large?
DAVID MCGEE: The really heartening thing
is how much interest there is.
We go out with the lab and go out to the Cambridge Science
Fair, or go to school visits or podcasts like this,
and there's just real curiosity and wonder.
And I want to remind us all that there's a big element of wonder
to all of this research, that it's
just fascinating that the climate system has
been as different as it has, and it's
important to understand that.
And to some extent, it's not a matter
of your political persuasion.
The Earth has just been different in the past,
and it's important to understand that.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: It's a scientific fact.
DAVID MCGEE: It's just a scientific fact.
But that said, this research does have implications
that we do need to pay attention to going forward.
Whenever our papers are picked up in the popular press,
you can go into the Comments section and read a lot of--
LAURA HOWELLS: That's a dangerous activity.
DAVID MCGEE: It is a dangerous activity,
and I don't do it too much.
But one of the common responses is, well, the Earth's climate
has constantly been changing in the past.
So why should we care?
LAURA HOWELLS: I hear that all the time.
DAVID MCGEE: The Sahara Desert didn't exist 6,000 years ago.
It wasn't because people were driving Hummers around.
That was one of the comments on, I think, one of our pieces.
Yes.
As I said, there's nothing special
about the Earth's climate today.
It's been warmer in the past.
It's been colder in the past.
CO2 has been higher.
It's been lower.
But we depend upon the climate that we have right now.
And that's what we're insured against.
That's what we're building around.
And so what we depend upon is stability.
And if there's one thing that paleoclimate studies teach you,
it's the instability of climate.
So you've been reaching out to students
at the Cambridge Science Festival and other venues,
but you're also running a wonderful experiment here
at MIT itself, which is Terrascope.
It's a residential program for MIT students, isn't it?
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: Freshmen.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: For freshmen.
So can you tell us exactly what Terrascope is,
and what do students do to get in,
and what do they experience?
DAVID MCGEE: Sure.
So Terrascope is what's known as a freshman learning community
at MIT.
It's something that freshmen freely choose
to join if they're interested.
It's a group of about 50 freshmen every year
who, in addition to their normal core classes
in math and physics and chemistry and biology
and humanities, take an additional course in the fall
and then take courses in the spring focused on tackling some
of the biggest challenges facing society
in the area of environment and sustainability.
So each year, we choose a topic.
That might be about energy supplies.
It might be about freshwater in the American West.
It might be about sustainable agriculture.
And give it to the freshmen and basically say, run with this.
Come up with a plan to address this challenge.
And at the end of the term, you're
going to be presenting it to a panel of experts
we convene from around the world.
And the intent has a few different elements.
One is to get freshmen, from day one,
thinking about how what they're studying at MIT
relates to these fundamental problems facing society.
The second is to give them a freshman class that's
profoundly student-centered.
They own the plan that comes out.
They own the product that comes out.
But they also own the process of how they get there.
None of them have been surrounded
with the sort of talent that they are surrounded
with from day one at MIT.
And so sitting in a class of 50 students who
are all MIT freshmen is daunting and challenging.
And it's a really important experience
for them to think about, OK, how do we
get everyone working together.
How do we break this seemingly intractable problem down
into manageable pieces and make progress and communicate
with each other between groups and within our groups
as we move forward?
And so we are there as instructors
not to give them a recipe for here's
how you make this beautiful product at the end,
but to help them reflect along the way.
So after a week we might say, OK, stop.
How's your group going?
What has worked well?
What hasn't?
And along the way, they think they're
solving the world's problems.
Mostly what they're learning how to do
is to work in teams on a really big, complex problem
that incorporates science and engineering
but also incorporates economics and public policy
and sociology.
That's the fall term.
And so they emerge from that daunted
by the complexity of this problem,
but also empowered by the process of having come up
with a plan that they've defended in front of experts.
That's a really powerful experience.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So what is this year's problem?
DAVID MCGEE: So this year's problem
I'm really excited about.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: We are, too.
DAVID MCGEE: It's about the challenge of climate change
adaptation-- that is, preparing coastal communities
for the impacts of climate change.
And we're asking the students this year
to focus on two very different coastal communities.
One is MIT itself and Cambridge.
MIT and Cambridge are just starting
to identify the vulnerabilities that they have to climate
change over the coming decades.
And these consist of heat waves, flooding
from more intense storms, and then also flooding
from storm surge and sea level rise.
And so they're at the point--
both MIT and Cambridge are at the point
of having identified the vulnerabilities,
but they haven't developed a plan yet.
And so we now bring these reports to the students
and say, OK, here's the problem.
What are you going to do about it?
And then the other community they
will be looking at is Southern Bangladesh, a place that
is presented with profound challenges from climate change
and has very different resources to respond.
So they'll be working with experts from both regions.
I should also say that as they--
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Will they be traveling to Bangladesh?
DAVID MCGEE: So they will not be traveling to Bangladesh.
They will be going--
so every year, we take a spring break trip to somewhere
in the world that has to do with that year's problem.
And that's designed to connect the students
to the problem in the field.
But it has a large function as a corrective action.
Sometimes they emerge from the fall term
thinking that a lot of the world's problems
could be just solved by sitting in Cambridge
and thinking deep thoughts and working with other MIT people.
And then they go to someplace in the world that's actually
dealing with the problem, and they realize, oh, there's
a reason that things function the way they do today.
And this is actually a lot more complicated than we thought.
So it gives them a dose of humility and reality.
And that's important, I think.
So this year, we're going to the Netherlands,
which has been described to us as Bangladesh with resources.
So this is a place that has built up
a lot of coastal defenses around the rivers
and the ocean that threaten it with flooding, a place where
they can see, firsthand, engineering projects
designed around flooding and then think
about how those projects might have
implications for Bangladesh and for MIT and Cambridge.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So I have one
of those double blind testing questions.
So the students are going to spend a year making
this plan for MIT.
MIT itself is probably, through its faculty and other experts,
doing the same thing.
When they've both tabled their report,
who do you think is going to be better?
DAVID MCGEE: That's a great question.
So I think the ideal would be that the final plan would
incorporate elements of both processes.
So certainly, we will be inviting
people from the Office of Sustainability, people from MIT
facilities as experts and panelists
at the final presentation to hear what the students have
to say and to ask them tough questions about their plan.
LAURA HOWELLS: Sorry.
Have there been plans in the past that
have really surprised you, impressed you in a way
that you just didn't quite expect from freshmen?
DAVID MCGEE: Every year they do something amazing.
They are taking four of their classes and then
this additional class.
And somehow, they come--
and it seems like nothing is happening,
and it's chaos for a long time.
But then something happens in much the same way
that it feels like to be in a theater production.
It feels terrible for a long time,
and then in the final week, it comes together.
And I guess one example that seems to have been particularly
successful is in 2012, they came up
with a plan of how to address the world's
need for strategic natural resources,
things like rare Earth elements and phosphorous
over the coming century.
And they produced a website that had their plan.
And this web site, every month, gets emails saying, OK,
we've been looking at your web site.
Blah, blah, blah.
They think that Terrascope is this bunch of consultants
who have come up with this amazing plan,
and it's really just freshmen who are saying,
this is just something we came up with.
But it speaks to the quality of their work.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Or it speaks
to the quality of consultants.
DAVID MCGEE: Right.
So I should also say that in the spring term, and of interest,
maybe, to the listeners of this podcast,
to complement that kind of big-scale planning
process that's in the fall term, there
are two other classes that they take.
One is a design class where they're
designing and fabricating specific technologies related
to the year's challenges.
So last year was on sustainable cities.
So we had groups that were coming up with small-scale wind
turbines for informal sediments, ways
of incorporating plastic debris into Adobe bricks, ways
of putting more bikes on city buses
so that bikes and buses could work better together.
And so it gives them experience in design
to address the problem of the year.
And then of specific interest to the listeners of this podcast
is a radio production class where
they are tasked with trying to communicate about the year's
problem to a broad audience.
And usually, this draws a lot of sound
from the spring break trip and builds it into about a half
an hour, 20-minute program that then gets broadcasted at MIT
and then put out on the Public Radio Exchange
and picked up around the country.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: It's terrific.
I listened to the one from Mexico City last year.
It was really creative and lots of fun to listen to.
DAVID MCGEE: That was a lot of fun.
And the one from the year before that,
from a trip to New Mexico that we
took that was really incredible-- it looked
at sustainable agriculture-- won the award
for the best collegiate radio documentary of the year.
It's a really, really nice piece.
LAURA HOWELLS: Amazing.
DAVID MCGEE: So if people are interested in learning more
about Terrascope, that's a great--
you can go to our web site, terrascope.mit.edu,
and then you can navigate to the radio pieces.
And they're a great way of learning about it.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: So David, every time
when we interview someone, we end
with what we call a magic wand question, which
is if you could wave a magic wand
and make the world be better--
at least the climate parts of the world--
what magic wand would you wave, and in what way
would you make the world better?
DAVID MCGEE: That's a really hard question.
For a long time, I kind of diminished the importance
of sea level rise.
I thought it was not that important an issue.
But as I've started reading up more and more about this year's
topic for Terrascope about climate change adaptation,
particularly in places like Southern Bangladesh,
I get more and more concerned about sea level rise.
And so if I could wave a magic wand
and basically slow down these ice sheets from melting--
and particularly, slow down the non-linear loss of ice sheets,
the really rapid responses of these outlet glaciers just
funneling water into the ocean or funneling ice into the ocean
to melt--
that's the first magic wand that comes to mind.
But I only got one.
Is that right?
LAURA HOWELLS: Yeah, that's it.
That's the problem.
That's why it's such a hard question.
DAVID MCGEE: I hope other people choose different things so we
can cover different parts.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: If we can just
nudge the Earth a little bit further away from the sun,
then we'll be fine.
DAVID MCGEE: Right.
The neat thing about paleoclimate
is that basically, every geoengineering experiment
is some sort of--
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Has been done.
DAVID MCGEE: Has been done in the past
somehow, whether it's reflective particles from volcanoes
or changing ocean chemistry or whatever, what have you.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: All right.
So we can learn from the past, and we
can learn from the present.
And we can learn from the future.
Thank you so much, David.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: All right.
Thank you.
LAURA HOWELLS: Thank you.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: Thanks.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Wasn't that the most interesting
interview?
LAURA HOWELLS: Yeah, it was fantastic.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: Wow.
Very inspiring what those students are doing.
LAURA HOWELLS: I'm actually quite jealous of what they're
able to do and get involved in.
It sounds so exciting.
It's something I would love to have been a part of when
I was in college.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: I want to go measure some lake rings.
I think that's what I want to do.
LAURA HOWELLS: He made it sound so easy, didn't he?
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Yes.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: Well, the terrific thing for me
was that they really cut the students a lot of slack
and let them do a lot on their own.
They provide resources and guidance,
but they're not heavy-handed, just telling them what to do
and how to think about things.
They're really helping them to be lifelong learners
about this stuff.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: I bet my daughter would like that.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: For sure.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: I think she feels like that there's
some slack that remains.
If you want to tell us what you've been up to this year,
we would love to hear from you.
So contact us.
LAURA HOWELLS: Yep.
You can get in touch with us either on the site,
where we're all members at climatex.mit.edu,
you can send us an email, climatex_feedback@mit.edu,
or you can get in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter.
We're everywhere whenever you want to find us.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: And you can leave a comment just
below this podcast.
LAURA HOWELLS: Yeah, absolutely.
Tell us what you'd like us to talk about next,
any guests you'd like us to have on.
We're all ears.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: Thank you for listening to us,
and goodbye from Cambridge.
DAVE DAMM-LUHR: Till the next time.
LAURA HOWELLS: Bye.
RAJESH KASTURIRANGAN: You can find us
wherever podcasts are cast.
And we would deeply appreciate your comments on our podcasts
if you have the time and the desire to do so.
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