Welcome to the first episode of our climate cluster. This isn’t a series about whether “the science is real” on climate change. This is a series about what the science says — and what it means for our lives, our politics, and our future. I suspect I’m like a lot of people in that I accept that climate change is bad. What I struggle with is how bad. Is it an existential threat that eclipses all else? One of many serious problems politics must somehow address?

I wanted to kick off the series with someone who knows the science cold. Kate Marvel is a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a professor at Columbia University’s Department of Applied Physics and Mathematics. But Marvel isn’t just a leading climate scientist. She’s also unique in her focus on the stories we tell each other, and ourselves, about climate change, and how they end up structuring our decisions.

We discuss:

• How a climate model actually works
• Why this is the good place
• Why there is so much variation in climate scientists’ predictions about global temperature increases
• Why global warming is only one piece of the much larger problem of climate change
• Why a hotter planet is more conducive to natural disasters
• The frightening differences between a world that experiences a 2°C temperature increase as opposed to a 5°C temperature increase
• Whether the threat of climate change requires solutions that break the boundaries of conventional politics
• The underlying stories that animate much of the climate debate
• Whether the planet can sustain continued economic growth
• What it means to “live morally” amid climate change
• And much more…

Book recommendations:

• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
• Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
• Annihilation by Jeff Vendermeer 

Most analyses of how to “solve” climate change start from a single, crucial assumption: that carbon emissions and global warming are inextricably linked. Geoengineering is a set of technologies and ideas with the potential to shatter that link.

Can we use them? Should we? Could they be used in concert with other solutions, or would simply opening the door drain support from those ideas? Even if we did want to deploy geoengineering, who would govern its use? And is mucking with the earth at this level more dangerous than climate change itself — which may, ultimately, be the choice we face?

Jane Flegal is a geoengineering expert at Arizona State University and a program officer at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust. She’s able to parse this debate with an unusual level of clarity, fairness, and rigor. This isn’t an argument for or against geoengineering. It’s a way to think about it, and that turns out to be a way to think about the climate change problem as a whole.

Book recommendations:

• The Planet Remade by Oliver Morton
• Experiment Earth by Jack Stilgoe
• Frontiers of Illusion by Daniel Sarewitz

Dave Roberts is an energy and climate writer at Vox and a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He started as his career covering climate science and clean energy technology, but — for reasons we discuss here — he now writes just as much about political psychology, media ecosystems, political institutions, and how they intersect with climate change.

We cover a lot in this conversation, including:

• “Tribal epistemology,” and why it’s crucial to climate paralysis 
• How the GOP went from the party of cap-and-trade to the party of climate denial 
• Why the right and left-wing media ecosystem’s diverged so dramatically
• What today’s climate activists get right about our politics that their predecessors got wrong
• The carbon tax dead-end
• How nuclear energy became so divisive
• The conflicting moral and social visions at the heart of the climate movement 
• Why it is impossible to separate technological innovation from the policy ecosystem that shapes it 
• Whether climate change really is an “existential” threat 
• What climate change will mean for the world’s poor

Book recommendations:

• Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston
• “State of the Species” by Charles C. Mann