Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out The Earth Supremacist Party: Why Mars Sucks and the GOAT Planet Needs Us, with Dr. Kate Marvel About this episode We live in America-first times. But what if we applied that instinct to a pro-Earth party? On a break from NASA's office above the Seinfeld diner, a leading scientist visits Pablo to power-rank the human viability of our solar system — and get excited about being part of the solution... instead of Elon Musk's vision of discount Bladerunner on Mars. Plus: Pablo's recruiting trip to SpaceX, why weather should be optional, The Independence Day Solution, witchcraft, livestock burps and life on a giant fart moon.
• Pre-order: "Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet"
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/human-nature-kate-marvel?variant=43110377324578
• Previously: How to Re-Make the Climate-Change Horror Movie as a Rom-Com
https://www.pablo.show/p/make-climate-change-a-rom-com
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Transcript 8,548 words · 13 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:56 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're going to find out what this sound is.
3:02 Speaker 02 So, this giant fart moon. NASA is very interested in investigating this place.
3:10 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
3:13 Speaker 03 You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network.
3:29 Pablo Torre? I feel like the number one thing people do, Dr. Kate Marvel, thank you for being here, by the way, when they say, "Dr. Kate Marvel, thank you for being here," is to then immediately say something about your name, which is phenomenal.
3:38 Speaker 02 It's real. Yes.
3:41 Pablo Torre? Investigation over. And what I found out today is that Dr. Kate Marvel is actually named Kate Marvel.
3:47 Speaker 02 The unearned privilege of an irrationally cool name has followed me throughout my entire life.
3:53 Pablo Torre? Is there a name-as-destiny kind of a thing? You were destined for something grandiose and cosmological, perhaps?
4:00 Speaker 02 Well, my grandpa was in the army, and he was a captain, so I think he wins.
4:04 Pablo Torre? Yeah. Literal Captain Marvel. Touche.
4:08 Speaker 02 There you go.
4:09 Pablo Torre? How do you describe, though, what it is that you do for people who are not initiated into your fandom, Kate?
4:15 Speaker 02 So I am an Earth scientist, which means that I use mostly physics, some computer modeling, to study the best planet in the world. I didn't start out as an Earth scientist. I thought I wanted to be an astrophysicist. I thought I wanted to study cosmology, which is literally everything in the universe. But the thing about studying everything in the universe is you realize that it's all horrible. This is the only good place in the entire universe, and I can actually say that as a scientist. Like, all of the other planets are garbage that we know of.
4:50 Pablo Torre? Oh, God. This is why I invited you here, because as an Earth supremacist, I feel like this is a political party. This is a messaging problem.
5:01 Speaker 02 I would vote for the pro-Earth party every single time.
5:08 Pablo Torre? So what I need you to understand here about Dr. Kate Marvel, as she sits in our studio in New York City, is that Dr. Kate Marvel works for NASA, an increasingly fraught government institution, thanks to President Donald Trump and the wealthiest guy in the world, Elon Musk, whose regime, together, started gutting NASA just last week. All of this happening, of course, while Musk's favorite mission, as he drives a cyber truck all over Social Security and the VA and, you know, aid for starving children, is Mars, as last week also made clear.
5:44 Speaker 04 And this could be your chance to blast off from Earth and end up on Mars. March Madness is right around the corner, and X is launching its X bracket challenge. So the ultimate grand prize is a trip to Mars.
6:00 Pablo Torre? Yeah, if you submit a perfect NCAA tournament bracket on the X bracket challenge, or whatever, you win a trip on SpaceX's starship vehicle to Mars. This is a serious contest, apparently. It is also the most direct appeal by Elon Musk to sports fans to date. This wound up reminding me of my own connection, which I have never talked about before on this show, to Elon Musk and his Mars obsession, which Dr. Kate Marvel and I will get to in a bit here. But first, what I need to stress is that what you're about to hear from Dr. Marvel is her personal perspective on all this stuff, not the perspective of her whole government office.
6:45 Pablo Torre? Although, her office, it turns out, isn't quite what I imagined either.
6:51 Speaker 02 So a lot of folks don't know that there's actually a NASA office in New York City. You know the Tom's Diner from Seinfeld?
6:57 Pablo Torre? Of course.
6:58 Speaker 02 We are right above it.
7:03 Speaker 02 A lot of people think that NASA is gonna be this cool facility with retina scans and stuff, and we are this disgusting 1950s office building with the fumes from the diner coming up.
7:16 Pablo Torre? And what Dr. Marvel and her NASA scientists have been quietly finding out while huffing those Seinfeld diner fumes, running models, and running what Dr. Marvel calls, quote, "a fancy version of The Sims," is really worth visualizing.
7:30 Speaker 02 There's a bunch of offices full of nerds. I am actually one of the best dressed people, low bar.
7:38 Pablo Torre? Kate is looking glamorous, and by that I mean she's wearing jeans and a black shirt.
7:42 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm. I don't have socks with sandals.
7:45 Pablo Torre? And so Dr. Marvel found herself one day testifying in front of the House of Representatives, its Ways and Means Committee in 2019, to tell them something extremely important about an exotic planet that we don't discuss nearly enough: Earth.
8:04 Speaker 02 I basically said the same thing that climate scientists have been saying for the past 30 years. If human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases continue to increase, we can expect warming of up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. For reference, the difference between now and the last ice age? 8 degrees Fahrenheit. It's actually kind of boring to do that kind of thing because as scientists, we want to talk about the stuff we don't know, right? Like, that's why we still have jobs. And instead, when you talk about things that are this solid, that are this unequivocal, you have to talk about stuff that we've known for 100 years, right? In the 1820s, scientists began to understand the physics of greenhouse gases.
8:45 Speaker 02 In the 1860s, we obtained experimental proof that carbon dioxide traps heat. The first scientific paper to connect increasing CO2 to global warming appeared in 1896. That is essentially the equivalent of like a chemist going to Congress and being like, "Yeah, we know what happens when you mix baking soda and vinegar. Like, we don't need to do this experiment again."
9:08 Pablo Torre? One of the quotes you said in front of Congress was...
9:11 Speaker 02 There is uncertainty about how much temperature increase we will expect in the future, but the main source of that uncertainty is what humans will do.
9:20 Pablo Torre? Could you explain why that message was so important to express?
9:25 Speaker 02 So, we don't know how hot it's gonna be. And a lot of people are really surprised about that, right? They're like, "You had one job, climate scientists." But there's a lot of scientific uncertainty because we've never done this experiment before, you know? Like, we've never kicked the planet this hard, this quickly. All of our projections are conditional on what are future humans going to do? Are we gonna get really serious about climate change? Are we gonna make drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions? Or are we just gonna like, dig up coal that we didn't know was there and burn it just because? And that is the number one reason we have uncertainty about the future. You can't write down an equation for people.
10:04 Pablo Torre? The notion of people being hard to quantify, people being hard to summarize in any algorithmic, multivariate way. There are all sorts of PhDs in sports these days, Kate, who are trying to predict... Human performance. They're paid lots of money to do that, to assess people who make lots of money to perform. And they can't.
10:28 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
10:29 Pablo Torre? All of the time. And I find that something that people in sports complain about, on again, the nerd egghead side, is how to communicate to the public broadly. A public that demands definitiveness. And I feel like part of your job professionally is not just being a really smart person who can play real life SimCity with the best of them. It's to actually persuade people to understand the world and beyond, literally, the way that you do.
11:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I think about this all the time because nobody actually thinks in terms of statistics and probabilities, right? The thing that actually matters is when game day rolls around, like, what's gonna happen? I love the World Cup because like crazy stuff happens.
11:17 Speaker 05 Taking his shirt off to show the scar to the referee. He's bitten.
11:23 Speaker 02 The guy bites the other guy.
11:28 Speaker 06 Zinedine Zidane just plants one into the chest of Marco Matarazzi. The referee cannot have seen that.
11:34 Speaker 02 The guy head butts the other guy. And no statistical model, no physical model, is going to be able to predict that.
11:40 Pablo Torre? Yeah, so with the World Cup, there is a trophy on the line every four years. What's at stake here, Kate?
11:48 Speaker 02 So we love to talk about things in terms of like temperature targets, right? Like the 1.5 degrees Celsius target set by the Paris Agreement. Nobody really cares about that. What we care about is the things that impact us, right? So we do know a lot of the physics of what happens when the earth gets warmer, right? So we know that when the whole place gets warmer, you tend to have more heat waves. We saw that last summer. Phoenix had this. Incredible stretch of days where it was above 100 degrees every single day.
12:22 Speaker 03 This heat is brutal, but just imagine falling on the pavement when it's at least 40 degrees hotter than the ambient temperature. In this case, it's more than 170 degrees. That's enough to cause severe burns.
12:38 Speaker 02 We also know that warm air is thirstier air. So for every degree Celsius, it gets warmer, there's about 7% more water vapor in the atmosphere. And that means that it can dump more water on us.
12:52 Speaker 07 New drone video shows just how bad the situation is in Asheville. The city's now isolated after roads leading there flooded and cell towers were knocked down. One emergency official calls it biblical devastation.
13:05 Speaker 02 So we are able to connect a warming planet with kind of a weirder planet.
13:11 Pablo Torre? Counterpoint, I could go stand in front of the American people on Capitol Hill and hold a snowball and say, "Fuck you, Kate Marvel. Check out this snowball."
13:22 Speaker 08 In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I asked the chair, "You know what this is? It's a snowball. And that's just from outside here. So it's very, very cold out, very unseasonal. So here, Mr. President, catch this.
13:43 Pablo Torre? This is now the late Jim Inhofe, Senator from Oklahoma.
13:46 Speaker 02 But climate change doesn't mean the entire Earth gets warm uniformly at exactly the same time. You can help me workshop this, because we call it internal variability, which just sounds boring, right?
13:59 Pablo Torre? Yeah, we're gonna have to change that.
14:00 Speaker 02 So we're gonna have to change that. But it's basically like random noise, right? So even if there were no humans, and we have done this experiment in climate models, we understand a lot of what the Earth would look like if there were no human influence whatsoever. And there would still be warm years and cold years. There would still be hurricanes. There would still be heat waves.
14:20 Pablo Torre? What we're doing is we're spinning the roulette wheel of burning.
14:25 Speaker 02 I love it. We should, yeah, we should call it that.
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18:24 Pablo Torre? I have my own just weird story when it comes to, frankly, Elon Musk. So I want to just tell this story because I've not said this aloud anywhere. So thank you for being my therapist, as well as my interviewee here. It was 2015, the beginning of 2015. I was working at ESPN. And a guy I went to college with, who worked for Elon Musk, sent me an email with, quote, "kind of a crazy idea." And the idea was that SpaceX needed someone to work in comms. They needed someone who could go on television and basically be a surrogate for Elon Musk and the SpaceX plan. And ideally, it would be someone who could speak to the general population of America, much like, let's say, I do when it comes to sports.
19:08 Pablo Torre? What if I took ESPN fluency and transposed it onto making humanity a multi-planetary species? And so I went to Hawthorne, California on a visit. It's the opposite of your office above Tom's Diner. Okay? It's the most cinematic place I've ever been, actually. It is their literal giant rocket parts suspended from the ceiling. It's just, it looks like the movie version of the future we were promised. It's a sci-fi movie. I went and the point being, I, spoiler alert, did not take the job, didn't pursue it, but was seduced for weeks about, wait a minute, isn't that like a profound calling?
19:50 Pablo Torre? Me helping fulfill a mission for a guy who, in 2015, Elon Musk, was saying stuff like this.
19:59 Speaker 10 So how do we accelerate this transition away from fossil fuels to a sustainable era? There's going to be no choice in the long term to move to sustainable energy. It's tautological. We have to have sustainable energy or we'll simply run out of the other one. So the, the only thing we gain by slowing down the transition is just slowing it down. It doesn't, doesn't make it not occur, it just slows it down. The worst case, however, is more displacement and destruction than all the wars in history combined.
20:27 Pablo Torre? So as I was holding my SpaceX visitors badge, I was thinking about a guy in Elon Musk who was saying stuff like, yeah, fossil fuels could lead to more displacement and destruction than all the wars in history combined. Do you remember hearing that guy say stuff like that?
20:43 Speaker 02 No, but I feel like 2015 Elon Musk makes some good points.
20:49 Speaker 02 I have seen the projections. I have seen what the Earth looks like if greenhouse gas emissions don't fall. The worst-case scenario is something that I find it hard to even imagine because it is so different from the world that we live in now. It could be a completely alien planet.
21:07 Pablo Torre? Right. But speaking of the alien planet that Elon Musk favors, one of the things that he just clearly sincerely has cared about this entire time consistently is that Mars is his project, you know, getting people, getting humanity to colonize Mars. It was not lost on me as I contemplated my alternate career path that it was Donald Trump's inaugural address. And he said-
21:34 Speaker 11 And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.
21:52 Pablo Torre? And in the background, by the way, you see Elon giving two thumbs up. Very normal human, definitely real human, relatable reaction.
22:00 Speaker 02 So I feel like I have to stand up for the science, right? Science is good. We should do more science. We should research Mars. We should send rovers there. We might even want to send people there if there is a science case for it. We have to understand Mars because otherwise, how would we know how much it sucks?
22:23 Speaker 02 Mars is fundamentally just not a very good planet. I mean, the only thing it has on us is you can jump higher and it's got two moons and we've only got one. It is not a good place to live. And so I would never want to go to Mars. I want to go to space, but only for a couple of days. I don't want to spend years going to a planet where there's a bunch of red rocks and then more red rocks. That is all there is there. And so the notion that Mars is going to somehow be a replacement for this perfect planet that we live on right now is bonkers to me.
23:05 Pablo Torre? This is where I now realize that you and I might have debated on cable news at one point. And I would have said to you, wait a minute. All Americans would love to dunk? Let us all dunk on Mars. That sounds pretty [bleep] cool, Kate.
23:19 Speaker 02 I feel like, yeah, I mean, if you want to propose that, like, we send the entire population of America to Mars. We do one dunk, we come back, and then, and then we take care of the Earth. Like, amen. Let's do it.
23:30 Pablo Torre? So what Elon's been saying, what my hypothetical would-be boss Elon Musk has been saying to Joe Rogan, his claim is that we need to have a second planet to preserve civilization.
23:42 Speaker 10 My view is we should move to Mars, or not move to Mars, we should have a second planet to preserve civilization. Because, let's say hypothetically, I mean, maybe that, maybe those are the ruins of a long-dead civilization. That will probably happen to Earth at some point. You know, it's a matter of time before we get hit by an asteroid, or maybe we do, we annihilate ourselves with nuclear war. Or supervolcanoes. Or supervolcanoes, exactly. Yeah.
24:10 Pablo Torre? Elon is saying this is a race against time.
24:13 Speaker 10 Can we make Mars self-sufficient before civilization has some sort of future fork in the road where there's either like a war, nuclear war or something, or we get hit by a meteor, or simply civilization might just die with a whimper in adult diapers instead of with a bang?
24:40 Speaker 02 I mean, how about we not do those things, right? Like, let's not have a nuclear war. Let's not destroy civilization. Let's not destroy our planet. Not causing our extinction is, for me, a pretty good Plan A.
24:56 Pablo Torre? Elon has been posting stuff, like, he's been posting these Mars promos, like, almost like tourism videos. I don't know if you've seen this. I do want to play it because part of the reason I also wanted to talk to you is because I saw this and I was like, I don't know if their comms department's doing the best job here.
25:14 Speaker 11 Humanity will be multi-planetary.
25:19 Pablo Torre? You know, it seems to be AI-generated sci-fi city stuff. There are like spaceships from Star Wars. There's a giant sign that says Mars on it. There are cars that fly around.
25:33 Speaker 11 Welcome to Mars.
25:38 Speaker 02 I mean, I feel like it's nothing but vehicles. So it's like, welcome, welcome to Mars. There's traffic.
25:45 Speaker 02 Great.
25:46 Pablo Torre? It's a very good point. And there's, there's just like a skyline. There are like these screens and stuff.
25:52 Speaker 02 I mean, it's like Discount Blade Runner, right?
25:54 Pablo Torre? It, it, it is absolutely Discount Blade Runner. And the whole notion is that it feels like the future.
26:03 Pablo Torre? Again, it's, it's like the fire fest of space colonization. Like you get there and what's actually the thing you find?
26:09 Speaker 02 I mean, probably you'll die, honestly, if you get there.
26:14 Pablo Torre? It's a downside.
26:14 Speaker 02 It's a downside. You know, thing about Mars, like not much of an atmosphere. No liquid water, nothing growing there, no ozone layer.
26:23 Pablo Torre? So explain why that might be an issue.
26:25 Speaker 02 Right, so our ozone layer is really good at protecting us from the UV light from the sun, UV radiation that would otherwise bombard us. So UV radiation is bad because it would give us all cancer, but it would also destroy our food system. UV bombardment is really bad for photosynthesis. And so stuff would have a really, really hard time growing. So even if you manage to fix a lot of the things about Mars, you couldn't grow anything outside. Just the, the steps you would have to take in order to survive. I am not just interested in humanity surviving. I'm interested in humanity having fun. And
27:05 Pablo Torre? Yes.
27:06 Speaker 02 Like, I want to thrive. I don't want to just not go extinct.
27:10 Pablo Torre? So when it comes to like the rest of the options in our universe, planet wise, I mean, there, there, there's a bunch. We got, depending on how we consider Pluto, we got at least like eight other options.
27:22 Speaker 02 R I P Pluto, never forget.
27:24 Pablo Torre? That's what we're, above Tom's diner, it's pretty clear that we're not doing.
27:27 Speaker 02 I mean, it's a dwarf planet. There's more dwarf planet, we can, we can keep Pluto for now.
27:33 Pablo Torre? Like a minor league.
27:33 Speaker 02 Minor league planet, for sure.
27:35 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
27:35 Speaker 02 I mean, I, I have a soft spot for Titan. Again, I do not want to live there. I do not want to go there. But Titan is really cool because on Titan, they have the water cycle, but it's not water, it's methane. So you're raining methane, which we think of as natural gas from the sky.
27:52 Pablo Torre? Just a quick point of clarification, Titan, moon of Saturn? Methane, the stuff we fart.
27:58 Speaker 02 Yes.
27:59 Pablo Torre? Cool.
27:59 Speaker 02 Yes. So this giant fart moon would be, you know, NASA is very interested in investigating this place because it is such an interesting contrast to Earth, right? You know, a lot of the dynamics of rainfall and evaporation and stuff is happening there. It's just happening with stinky methane.
28:20 Pablo Torre? Right.
28:21 Speaker 02 And so, you know, I think if we were going to propose places to go live or to send some people to go live, maybe, maybe that would be an option.
28:32 Pablo Torre? Okay. So just to be clear here, you led with fart moon. Among all of the places in the universe that we could reasonably maybe aspire to inhabit, fart moon.
28:43 Speaker 02 Sure, why not?
28:45 Pablo Torre? But like the other options, I mean, I want your full unvarnished, unbiased, uncompromised, personal, not NASA-approved perspective on, okay, Mercury's pretty close to the sun, right? Like solar power, right? Like, let's say, I'm just spitballing here, but how about Mercury?
29:01 Speaker 02 I mean, Mercury, you get wild swings between temperature day and night. So day, everything that we know would burn up. And then night, everything would freeze. So Mercury is not a very good candidate. We don't know of any good candidates in our solar system. Venus.
29:16 Pablo Torre? Oxygen, right? Any oxygen on Venus?
29:18 Speaker 02 Venus, mostly carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We get on Venus what's called a runaway greenhouse effect where it's basically incredibly hot and completely choked with carbon dioxide. And then, honestly, I am not sure I've ever thought about Uranus or Neptune.
29:33 Pablo Torre? Uranus.
29:34 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
29:34 Pablo Torre? That's how the pros say it.
29:35 Speaker 02 I think so.
29:40 Pablo Torre? All of which feels like a pretty good place to note that Dr. Kate Marvel here contradicts the research of my previous astronomy professor, PTI's Dr. Tony Kornheiser. Pardon the interruption, but I'm Pablo Torre and Tony, a small asteroid narrowly missed Earth.
29:57 Speaker 12 Tony Kornheiser. Let's hope it doesn't slam into Uranus.
30:02 Pablo Torre? But I digress. Because what Dr. Kate Marvel is trying to get us to do as an avowed Earth supremacist is basically see Mars and any other planet the way Fox News wants you to, you know, see the New York City subway system. As this deadly and alien wasteland, you should absolutely be horrified to visit. Which is to say that part of what Elon Musk is pushing for here with electric vehicles as a general concept makes sense, right? Insofar as that's good for the Earth. But the administration that, as of last week, also fired NASA's top climate researcher
30:42 Pablo Torre? and started formally disappearing the phrases "climate science" and "clean energy" from government documents, and yet also still fetishizes Mars, enshrining it as the prize for an apocalyptic March Madness bracket, feels to me, overall, like this planetary death cult. And what Dr. Kate Marvel would love for us to do here is defend our own, our own life, our own atmosphere, here on Earth.
31:14 Speaker 02 I actually hate clouds. I mean, I used to live in England. I feel like I've had all the clouds I need for the rest of my life. I just feel like I have a human right to have every day be 70 degrees and sunny. And when it's not, I feel sort of personally attacked. But, you know, like, I'm interested in clouds because, going back to the question of how hot is it gonna get? Now, obviously, the reason we don't know exactly how hot it's gonna get is we don't know what humans are gonna do, but there are physical aspects of the climate system that we don't understand. There are some things that we totally understand, right? We know what happens to ice. But the thing that we don't understand is what's gonna happen to clouds. Like, how are cloud patterns going to shift as the Earth gets hotter?
31:59 Speaker 02 And is that going to speed up or slow down the warming? And the reason that that's really hard to do is clouds are incredibly complicated, right? There's all these different kinds of clouds. Clouds block sunlight, so they make it colder. They also have their own greenhouse effects, so that makes it hotter. There's clouds in different regions. Those are all moving around. And all that is really, really difficult to understand and to get right in the climate model. But I do get really annoyed when people confuse climate with weather, right?
32:27 Pablo Torre? So this is another bit of news we can all use, I think.
32:30 Speaker 02 I've heard it said by Marshall Shepard, who's a professor at Georgia, that weather is your mood and climate is your personality. So climate is the background conditions under which weather can happen, right? Weather is changeable. And climate is shaped by things that aren't really supposed to change on short time scales, right? Weather is air masses moving around and, you know, water vapor coming up from wherever. But climate is sort of the room in which all of that activity is happening. So going back to like the guy with the snowball.
33:06 Pablo Torre? Yeah, Senator Jim Inhofe.
33:08 Speaker 02 Climate change doesn't mean weather doesn't happen anymore. It doesn't mean every single day is going to be a perpetual catastrophe.
33:16 Pablo Torre? Right. So in other words, if I can just translate all of this, so Earth might sometimes be that friend that like ghosts you for dinner and you're like, what the [bleep] man? Mars, though, is just a straight up [bleep] all the time.
33:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, I like that. We should, we should put that on the NASA website.
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37:02 Pablo Torre? Historically, because you're also an author, you're a student of history with a new book coming out in June. Yes?
37:08 Speaker 02 June 17th, I think.
37:09 Pablo Torre? There it is. And part of your book, I believe, examines the ways that we humans here on Earth have reacted to climate change throughout time. What did you find in your research?
37:19 Speaker 02 So I want to stress that I am not a historian. I love history, but my relationship to history is basically as gossip. Like, I want to know the cool stuff that happened.
37:28 Pablo Torre? Perfect.
37:31 Speaker 02 But it's actually really fascinating because... So people love to tell climate scientists, like, "Don't you know the climate's changed before?" And we're like, "We know. We told you that." And like, it's totally true that there have been natural climate changes in the past. Nothing as large or as rapid as what we're seeing, but there have been times in the past where the climate has been slightly different. So in roughly like the 1300s to the 1800s, there was a period that we call the Little Ice Age. Nowhere near as cold as the real Ice Age, but basically a bunch of volcanoes happened to go off and put so much stuff in the atmosphere that it blocked the sun and actually made it slightly colder then as opposed to now.
38:15 Speaker 02 And if you look at the history of especially Northern Europe during that time, you start seeing a lot of people being blamed for the weird weather.
38:24 Pablo Torre? Individuals?
38:25 Speaker 02 Individuals. And so there's actually research that shows that whenever the weather gets weird, there's actually a spike in accusations of witchcraft.
38:36 Speaker 02 And, you know, that for me is really fascinating because I like to think like, "Oh, I'm a physicist. I'm really rational." But people are not rational. There is no way of saying, "Here is how people are going to react to a change in the climate, a change in the weather, the average weather." Because if you look back to early modern Europe, people lose their minds and start burning people at the stake.
38:59 Pablo Torre? We throw people in lakes because we think that they are at fault. They're the reason our crops all died.
39:06 Speaker 02 Mm hmm. Yeah, it's so this is this was my favorite thing that I learned. The monarch of Scotland, King James VI, real weirdo. Really obsessed with the science of how you identify and punish witches. He's actually the only British monarch to have ever published a peer reviewed scientific paper about witches. And then I'm not exactly sure what happened, but they ran out of kings in England. So he got to come down and be king of England, too.
39:36 Pablo Torre? Oh, get the big call up.
39:37 Speaker 02 So you live in England, you're a playwright, you've got a new king. You want to suck up to the new king. He's Scottish, he's obsessed with witches. And he's really obsessed with kind of his bloodline. So that's where Macbeth comes from.
39:54 Pablo Torre? I feel like I should have known that the punchline was, and that's where Macbeth comes from. And yet it still hit me, still got me, it still got me. So in other words, there is some artistic upside to being ruled by maniacs.
40:08 Speaker 02 Oh, my God, this is going to be the headline from this like.
40:11 Pablo Torre? That's right, not so bad when we burn women at the stake.
40:15 Speaker 02 I mean, you get some real good entertainment out of it.
40:17 Pablo Torre? Yeah, as always, we feel bad for our universe, but this is tremendous content. Who should we be burning at the stake?
40:25 Speaker 02 Oh, I pass on who exactly we should be burning at the stake. The fact that humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide, a heat trapping gas in the atmosphere by 50% since the Industrial Revolution. Like, that is huge, that is a huge change. But I think it's also important to stress that when we say humans have done this, we don't mean all humans, right? Those of us in wealthy countries are obviously per capita emitting much, much more than residents of of less developed countries. And even when we look within wealthy countries, you know, who's really driving this? Who is really driving the institutions that say fossil fuels are good? We're not going to change.
41:11 Speaker 02 You know, that's not everybody. And I think it's important when we talk about who is causing this. That's a really complicated question because I feel very confident as a scientist saying it's greenhouse gases that are causing it to get warmer. But it's not the molecule's fault. Like, they didn't emit themselves.
41:30 Pablo Torre? I'm glad that we've clarified the innocence of the molecule itself. Carbon didn't ask for any of this.
41:36 Speaker 02 It did not. It's not its fault.
41:38 Pablo Torre? But the United States, as we, as a country, walk away from the Paris Climate Accords as we are freezing funds for wind energy, our largest source of renewable energy. I'm just struggling to find a way to not get you fired from your job while also being optimistic. Right? Thread the needle here of maybe human existence. How do you approach all of this as you also describe Earth, as I believe, like a drunken sailor?
42:06 Speaker 02 So, you know, taking off my scientist hat right now and putting on my, like, ignorant member of the public hat, which I am in my day to day life. My sense is that 2015 Elon Musk is kind of right. So, please don't let that be the headline.
42:24 Pablo Torre? We're gonna cut out-
42:24 Speaker 02 Kate Marvel loves Elon Musk.
42:26 Pablo Torre? Cut out the 2015 part. You're gonna be very popular in government.
42:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, that guy had a point, though. That the transition to renewable energy, the transition to wind and solar, is basically inevitable now. It can be slowed down, it can't be stopped. When I started my career, kind of wind and solar were these, like, niche energy sources that were really expensive. And it was kind of like, you did that to show that you were like a good hippie.
42:54 Pablo Torre? Yes.
42:54 Speaker 02 And now, solar is the cheapest way of generating electricity in human history. It's reliable, it's better. And so, my sense is that that's inevitable, but the question is geopolitically, who's gonna lead it? Is it gonna be the US? Is it gonna be Europe? Is it gonna be China? And I think those are the questions that- Are getting decided by actions right now.
43:17 Pablo Torre? I am curious how you message this. How the do I tell my kids about this?
43:22 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
43:22 Pablo Torre? How do you? How do you talk about all of this? Given that there is political obstruction and it seems like, I don't know, a bit of a death cult forming.
43:32 Speaker 02 I mean, I don't know how to talk about that aspect of it. Um, I do know how to talk about the science. I do know how to talk about the solutions because we do have solutions and they're cool. They're fun. Like, kids aren't actually that entranced by large coal-fired power plants. It's not cool technology. Solar panels are cool technology. Like, wind turbines are giant. If you go to Jones Beach, they've got an energy center and they've got a giant wind turbine blade.
44:03 Pablo Torre? Oh, yeah.
44:04 Speaker 02 And it's just really cool to look at.
44:06 Pablo Torre? I've seen a guy, whose name is Lethal Shooter, he's a basketball influencer, shoot a basketball into like a rim hung on the other end of like the spinning blades of a wind.
44:15 Speaker 02 Oh, that's awesome.
44:16 Pablo Torre? Turbine, yeah. It's, it's the coolest version of a trick shot I've ever seen.
44:22 Speaker 02 Can't do that with a natural gas plant.
44:24 Pablo Torre? Absolutely not.
44:25 Speaker 07 I understand it now.
44:30 Speaker 02 Because it's not just electricity, right? Like, only about 25% of global emissions come from the electricity sector. Um, we've got a lot of emissions from the transportation sector, which we can fix by moving to public transit, making walkable cities, um, shifting to electrified vehicles. We have a bunch of emissions coming from the land system. So stopping deforestation is important. Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas and it comes from rice paddies and livestock burps. People get really.
45:01 Pablo Torre? Livestock burps.
45:02 Speaker 02 People get really upset when you say it's livestock farts. It's not farts, it's burps.
45:06 Pablo Torre? Excuse me, burp moon.
45:08 Speaker 02 Mm hmm. And, um, so these are, these are big sources of greenhouse gases. So there's not a one-size-fits-all solution. But if your kids are nerds, which mine are, because, you know, it's inherited.
45:22 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
45:23 Speaker 02 You actually get really excited about being part of the solution. And, you know, I know you, you talked to Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and she's got this great framework, right, of like. What needs to be done? What are you good at? And what brings you joy? And that's a Venn diagram. And if you look at the thing that's in the middle of the Venn diagram, that's what you do. There is no one thing that you can do. And you can actually flip the script and say, what are you gonna do to help? And like, how does that excite you?
45:53 Pablo Torre? Yeah. I mean, it's hard not to hear you talk and just realize how unleveraged some of the most basic things that everybody loves about Earth, how unleveraged those things have been in political and just normal, like, human conversation about all of this stuff.
46:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, I have found when talking to people, you know, if you say, "I'm a climate scientist," people think you're gonna yell at them. People are like, "I use paper straws." I'm like, "I don't care."
46:20 Pablo Torre? You're about to throw soup at the Mona Lisa, is the vibe that, you know, again, I'm glad you haven't on our artwork here.
46:28 Speaker 02 I mean, I used to tell my dad, who's a conservative, that my job was researching the proper food stuff to throw at art. But the point is that if you, if you lead with sort of shame and blame and guilt, people are gonna tune out, right? Because everybody's got a lot on their plate right now. People don't want one more thing to feel bad about. But if you lead with the fact that the Earth is awesome, if you lead with wonder, like, people are gonna be on board, right? If I say, "Eat much less beef, you bad person," you're gonna tune out. But if I'm like, "Did you know all the water on Earth came from space? And it's probably older than the sun?" Like, people are gonna be like, "Holy [bleep], now I wanna talk to you."
47:09 Pablo Torre? Speaking of the people you talk to, you mentioned your dad. Where is he in the matrix of people that you've wanted to convince or intuitively understand? Or how does that work?
47:18 Speaker 02 So I would love to say that I changed my dad's mind about climate change, that his beloved daughter, who he talks to every week, finally brought him around. And he has come around on climate change, but that's not what changed his mind. The thing that changed his mind was insurance companies. The fact that every reinsurance company has a climate scientist on staff and insurance companies are all pricing in climate risk. And there is no financial incentive for them to do that if it wasn't real, right? If it wasn't real, another insurance company could come along, undercut the market and offer insurance at much cheaper rates. But they don't do that because they know that it's real.
47:59 Speaker 02 And my dad was like, well, if capitalism says it's real, it's real.
48:04 Pablo Torre? If the greediest people in America think it's real, then that tells me something. Genuinely tells all of us something about this.
48:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I think it really matters who the messenger is, right?
48:28 Pablo Torre? Right, as somebody who contemplated being a messenger for a cause I now realize is at odds with what we're agreeing on, what everybody agrees on, that trees are cool, animals are cool, being alive is cool, water is cool. It's just funny, it's darkly hilarious that we are watching a political movement, and these are my words, not Dr. Kate Marbles, but we're watching a political movement unfold around America in which we're closing borders. America first, we are more nationalist broadly speaking than we've ever been, we're telling the rest of the world to [bleep] off.
49:05 Pablo Torre? And meanwhile, I'm like, what if we applied that same supremacist instinct to the planet versus the rest of the universe, as opposed to just our country versus the rest of our planet?
49:19 Speaker 02 Do you think we need an alien invasion? Do you think that would do it?
49:23 Pablo Torre? I've thought about this, the ID4, the Independence Day solution.
49:27 Speaker 03 Today, we celebrate our Independence Day.
49:33 Pablo Torre? What would it take to bring us together in true unity?
49:37 Speaker 02 I don't know. I mean, my sense right now is like, not now, aliens, not now.
49:42 Pablo Torre? We've got so much going on.
49:44 Speaker 02 But yeah, I wonder about that. I wonder, because people, including myself, have a really hard time thinking about ourselves as part of this earth, right? When you start talking about saving the earth, people think about, you know, oh, I use a renewable tote bag or whatever. And that's not what it's about. It's part of existing on the only planet where it is possible for us or anything else to exist.
50:10 Pablo Torre? It's an amazing thing to be able to actually factually, scientifically, and morally claim. That we have looked into everything else that's out there. And in this one circumstance, the circumstance of our planet, we're actually the greatest of all time.
50:27 Speaker 02 Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, this planet is the greatest of all time. And this time is the greatest of all time. Right? Like, we know a lot about Earth history. We know what happened, you know, 65 million years ago. You don't want to be alive then. We know what happened 250 million years ago. There was volcanoes, massive volcanic activity. That actually burned all the fossil fuels then in the Earth's crust, put a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Almost everything on Earth died. So the farther back you look in Earth history, the more disappointed you get, right? So, you know, age of the dinosaurs. I don't want to be alive then. In the Paleocene, there were snakes that were 40 foot long. Don't want to live then.
51:11 Speaker 02 And when you think about it, this is basically the only time that human civilization can exist and the only place that human civilization can exist that we know of.
51:21 Pablo Torre? I want you saying that into the P A. system like the president in Independence Day. Genuinely.
51:29 Speaker 02 Sign me up.
51:30 Pablo Torre? Dr. Kate Marvel, you've changed the way I think about our planet. You've changed the way I think about diners. And if all of this is [BLEEP], I guess I'll see you on Fart Moon.
51:40 Speaker 02 Looking forward to it. Thank you so much.
51:50 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.
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Previous Share & Severance & Tell with Katie Nolan and Michael Cruz Kayne Next Share & Cinderella & Tell with Lucy Rohden and Rodger Sherman Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated