Heat Stroke with Bud Cooper and Radley Horton

How do you prevent a heat stroke? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly learn about stopping heat illness deaths and the challenges of increasing heat waves with kinesiologist, Bud Cooper, and climate scientist, Radley Horton.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition. Today, we're going to talk about heat stroke, why that's bad and sometimes lethal, what causes it and how to avoid it. Of course, I've got with me my two co-hosts, Gary O'Reilly. Gary?

• 0:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey Neil.

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Former soccer pro and active sports commentator, and we borrow him from the rest of his life to participate on StarTalk Sports Edition. And of course Chuck Nice. Chuck? Hey Neil, that's right. All right, my longtime co-host, professional comedian and actor. Yes, acting like a comedian. Acting like a comedian, okay. So Gary, what have you cooked up today about heat stroke?

• 0:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, the whole world has basically been sweltering and suffering through heat waves recently. But what if you were an athlete and you had to do your thing outside in the summer months? Now, this fact is going to leave you a little bit cold. Between 1980 and 2009, there were sadly, tragically, 58 football players dying of hyperthermia in America.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So not hypothermia, which we all heard about when you freeze to death. Hyperthermia.

• 1:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Correct. So these were all American football players in the US, sadly, mostly in high school.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ouch.

• 1:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Now, yes, ouch. Clearly, something needed to be done and someone thankfully stepped up. Now, on the back of that, what is climate going to be like in places like Atlanta in 10, maybe 20 years' time? What precautions are going to be necessary for us, not just athletes? At that time, will sports themselves have to change? Uh, for those answers, we will need a climatologist and help us see into the future, and that will be coming up later on in the show. But firstly, let me introduce you to a lifesaver, Professor Bud Cooper, clinical professor in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Georgia. Right, helped instigate the heat rules for Georgia high schools, in particular for high school football.

• 2:19Gary O'Reilly?

  He sits on the Medical and Science Advisory Committee Board for the Corey Stringer Institute in Connecticut. Now, if that name is familiar, just Minnesota Vikings player, and the death of that man was tragic. Uh, also Bud Cooper is a person who used science to save lives. So Neil, a hero.

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're all in. Thank you, Professor Cooper, for being part of the show. Can I call you Bud?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely, and my pleasure to be with you guys today. This is, uh, this is an opportunity.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. So could you just tell us, by the way, kinesiology, I read a book, an entire book on kinesiology when I was in high school, and I said, damn, if I didn't love astrophysics so much, I'd be a kinesiologist. It was, it was like, it was, it was physics applied to the human body in ways that I was just so fascinated.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I just want you to know that I might have been like your classmate or your or down, down the hall from you, uh, in, in your department.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  And we would have had a lot of fun, I'll tell you that right now.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What goes on in heat related illnesses? I know that, you know, we're warm-blooded, so we have to maintain our body temperature to function. That's part of the lot that we're dealt at being, uh, human beings. So, so you're saying at some point we can't maintain it, and the temperature just goes up and there's nothing our body can do about it?

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Well, your body has a thermoregulatory system that's built in, that's wonderful. And, and when we start to get hot, what do we do? We start to sweat. So as we are engaged in activities and the outside temperatures begin to rise, our thermo regulatory system has to adapt to that. And as long as we can keep that metabolic balance going on, we're in good shape. It's when that balance is not met that we have to look at alternative means with which we can implement policies or practices that will prevent the catastrophic events such as heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you're sweating, of course, presumably your body needs the sweat to evaporate. Otherwise, it's not, you just get wet and funky. So when you talk about heat, I presume it's not just the heat. There's a humidity factor as well, right?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Actually, there's, there's two factors that play into that. Humidity is, is by far the largest influential factor. And, you know, down here in Georgia, we, we, we call it the hot corner of the United States because it is not only hot, but it's also humid. But the other component that goes into all of this is what's called the radiant heating effect. This is what, what everybody experiences. You go outside, it's been a hot day, you lean against a, a building that's brick and you go, oh, that wall's hot. Or if you stand in a parking lot and you go, oh, man, that asphalt is cooking. Yes.

• 5:17Chuck Nice?

  Basically, the, the cooking the egg on the surface of something that's been sitting in the sun.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  It is, it is. And, and, and we're running into more and more of that because yes, we're seeing hotter days, days that are hotter longer. So getting hotter earlier in the day and lasting a longer period of time. But we're also seeing that, for whatever reason it may be, we're seeing that institutions, colleges, universities, high schools, all putting in artificial surfaces now because it's easier to maintain. We don't have to worry about the grass getting chewed up. We don't have to water it. We don't have to do any of those kinds of things. However, all of those artificial surfaces are now contributing to that solar heating effect because of the manner in which those surfaces

• 6:07Speaker 02

  are manufactured. So it's becoming a big problem. The most common underlying surface of those artificial surfaces is ground up automobile tires. And if you watch any, any-

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've done that. I laid out, I laid flat on one of those fields and parted the quote grass and it was just jet black underneath.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Little particulate particles. And I said, whoa.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. You, you watch any of the, uh, you know, college or NFL games over the weekends or whatever, you'll see the athletes turn and cut and get tackled and you see that black cloud kind of fly up.

• 6:40Chuck Nice?

  Little black cloud come up.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 6:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Which they, which in a way, if you're a fan, it's kind of cool because it's what they use to show if a guy's foot was in bounds. You see the little, the little shards of tires go up in the air. You're like, oh, he was clearly in.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  He was in.

• 6:57Chuck Nice?

  Clearly he was in.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. Absolutely.

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Cool.

• 7:00Gary O'Reilly?

  So Dr. Cooper, do you just look at someone and say, you need to go sit in the shade? Or is, is there a clinical process for you to decide that this person is about to enter a heat stroke?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  So there are a number of different things that we are looking at, not just the amount of sweating that's occurring. In fact, in some cases, somebody's sweating mechanism could actually have shut down and they stopped sweating. It's in one way or the other. It's not just one. It could, it could be, uh, either too much sweating or profuse sweating. It could be not sweating very much at all. Um, they could appear very red faced or they could be very pale. Um, they oftentimes will start to lose a little bit of their cognitive abilities. They'll look very lethargic.

• 7:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Disorientation.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Disorientation. So, uh, there are a number of different components that we look at. Uh, I was the athletic trainer that was in charge of sports medicine for the Peachtree Road Race. Gary probably don't know that one, but it's the largest 10K in the United States. Fifty-five thousand runners on July 4th.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  And so, you know, we would obviously want to be very keen on preventing heat stroke. And we would have medical personnel along that entire 10K road race course, looking for individuals who exhibited those types of symptoms. And when we saw them, we would pull them out of the race, transport them to the finish line, and there we would treat them. And I'm happy to say, in the 10 years that I oversaw that, we never lost a participant because we did the right thing.

• 8:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but they punched you in the face for taking them out of the race.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  They didn't like that. They did not like that. That's right. We told them they would get their... Get your hands off of me. Told them they'd get their t-shirts, so.

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's something we should have said at the beginning that we didn't, and correct me if I'm wrong. The reason why we sweat is on the expectation that the sweat will evaporate, and the evaporation cools our body.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  It does.

• 9:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if it's humid, the sweat is less likely to evaporate, and therefore less likely to cool your body.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's the foundation of what's going on here. Did I say that correctly?

• 9:12Chuck Nice?

  Isn't that why they have, what's it called, the wet bulb temperature, which is different for, I mean, for somebody being able to withstand the heat?

• 9:23Speaker 02

  It's a comprehensive assessment of the environment. It looks at humidity, it looks at air temperature, and it also takes into account that radiant heat issue. So it looks at all three of those variables, albeit humidity is the most heavily weighted variable. But you're right, as the humidity gets higher and higher, and it's not uncommon in the southeast for us to have humidity days where the humidity level was 80, 85%. But if you would go to, you know, Phoenix, or Albuquerque, or whatever, their humidity levels are down 20, 25%. So it's very different. It's 150 degrees, but it's a dry heat. It's a dry heat. You'll love it. So as that humidity level gets higher, it makes

• 10:06Speaker 02

  it more difficult for the body to evaporate the sweat off of your skin. So...

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just wanted to establish that up front, because it plays into so much of what we're talking about.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  It does. It does.

• 10:19Gary O'Reilly?

  So if we're finding ourselves unable to cool down through sweating, that must be affecting our core temperature. And there must be a point where that is an indicator of... Oh, heat stroke, or you're about to go, let's do something to prevent that. Or it's too late, you're already there. So how are we, we being you and your medical staff, identifying that as a fact?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  So looking at it as a variable, can we predict it? It's very difficult because the best way to assess your core temperature is doing it rectally. And that's how we get the most accurate assessment of what your core temperature is. But when your core temperature hits 104, that's the critical breaking point. Anything above that are really at risk of succumbing to a heat stroke, and that could be a catastrophic event. So that is, that is what we do. So when we see someone that is exhibiting those signs and symptoms that I mentioned earlier, we immediately, you know, bring them into an environment that is not stressful. So more shade, remove their clothing as best we can.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  And we do a rectal temperature probe to see what their core temperature is. And if it's at that level, we immediately immerse them in a cold water tub. Got to get their temperature down.

• 11:38Chuck Nice?

  I gotta say, getting your temperature taken rectally will certainly make that a memorable practice.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Well, and if you're at that level, 103, 104, I promise you, you're not going to fight me on that because you're probably not going to be conscious.

• 11:53Chuck Nice?

  You're going to be knocked out anyway. So, yeah.

• 11:56Gary O'Reilly?

  So the thing is, the thing is, doctor, if your medical team or a medical team is not around and someone is starting to hit those numbers, what then collapses within the body to end up with fatality?

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I want to add to that, but how is it that our body can be so sensitive to just a couple of degrees up around there? What is the most sensitive organ to just a few degrees change?

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Well, again, your, your, your core organs are going to fluctuate on that. But your hypothalamus is the control center of telling whether or not we need to do different things. So that, that's going to be the control center for that going on. But you're really, as an individual, and you're succumbing to those kinds of things, you're not going to know that that's what's going on. So you're at the mercy of having medical professionals there. There was a case report of a, of an individual who had gone, I think it was in Phoenix, Arizona, to participate in a mountain biking event. And he was coming from the east, not hot, not dry, like that area.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Got started on the race. He was about a mile or two into the race, got off course, and nobody knew where he was. And they finally found him about an hour later, lying unconscious. They thought that he had fallen and had a head injury and was unconscious as due to that. And they treated him as such. They never looked at his core temperature or anything like that. When they finally got him to the hospital, it was then that they deduced that it was actually a heat stroke. And unfortunately, the individual didn't survive the event. And that was because it was not diagnosed correctly. And again.

• 13:44Chuck Nice?

  On the spot.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  You know, there was just a tragic, tragic chain of events there.

• 13:50Chuck Nice?

  So now, when you call it a stroke, does it mimic any of the characteristics of an actual stroke? A traditional stroke. A traditional brain stroke? And are any of the resulting injuries, lasting injuries, do they mimic a traditional stroke?

• 14:12Speaker 02

  So if you're a look at the true definition of stroke, he had a stroke. We're talking about the cutting off of blood flow to the brain. That's usually brought about by a clot or an aneurysm, something along those lines. When we look at heat stroke, it's a little bit different. And that is that the body, because it is getting to be so hot that the internal organs are shutting down as a result of that, they're not shunting blood in the direction of your brain. So yes, it would be catastrophic from that perspective. But it's not to be construed as the same thing as what we see from a cardiovascular death that's brought about by a stroke from that true definition.

• 14:53Gary O'Reilly?

  So Bud, we've got what goes on, the physiology of suffering, heat distress and heat stroke. What are your heat rules? And is it as simple as gun standing in the shade?

• 15:05Chuck Nice?

  Which, by the way, my mom used to tell us when we would play football in the back of the house where there were no trees at 2 o'clock in the afternoon in July. And she would say, "What the hell are you doing? Get in the shade. You're gonna have a heat stroke."

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As she was saying that, okay, that's an informed person. By the way, just to reiterate what Bud said earlier, it's not just the temperature of the air outside, it's the radiant energy coming to you from any source, be it the walls, the ground, or of course, the sun. So if you step out of the sun into the shade, that takes away one of the forces driving your heat exposure. So when we come back, Bud is going to tell us exactly what Bud's rules are, and what is it about them that helps him save people's lives, other than just telling them, get the hell out of this.

• 15:50Chuck Nice?

  And other than Chuck's mom's rules.

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck's mom's rules, alright. She didn't get famous with those rules. Let's find out why Chuck's mom is not who's being interviewed here, and Bud Cooper is, when StarTalk Sports Edition continues.

• 16:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Sports Edition, we're back. We're talking about heat stroke, and we've got Dr. Bud Cooper from the Kinesiology Department at the University of Georgia, whose heat rules have saved the lives of athletes, especially those in high school, who get run into the ground by their athletic coaches. And Bud, just what are these rules? And why should they be different from anything anyone came up with before?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  So the rules that have been in place for years were brought out by the American College of Sports Medicine. They had a position statement on how you can prevent exertional heat stroke. It was a consensus position statement by a bunch of people who are really, really knowledgeable in the area, but it was opinions. They sat around, talked about it.

• 17:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're talking about B.C. times, before Cooper.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Before Cooper, right, right.

• 17:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, B.C., okay.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  So, to address the problem, I wanted to look exactly at what was going on. So I did a three-year epidemiological study, where I just tracked everything. We had high schools involved in the study, representing five areas across the whole state of Georgia. And we had certified athletic trainers at each of those high schools and I collected data for three years. I needed to see where the trends were. We looked at everything from length of practice to wet bulb low temperature numbers to time in the season. We looked at all of that. And at the end of the three years, I was able to aggregate all that information

• 17:57Speaker 02

  and then come up with policy suggestions that addressed all that. And what we saw was that

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying is that everyone before you just pulled it out of their ass?

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or rather, let me be more polite. They did not treat it as a study. They just thought, this makes sense to me. Let me just put that in the pot.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 18:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what that sounds like.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Right. That would be like asking you and Gary and Chuck as to what's the best way to cook a steak. You would all have your opinion.

• 18:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody's got a different way.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  And everybody's got a different way.

• 18:28Chuck Nice?

  And my answer is let someone else cook it.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the best steak you have.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Best steak you've ever had in your life. That's right. Absolutely. So we looked at that data and we came up with, what we saw was that in the month of August, which was the first four weeks of football practice, that was the most critical time. And we could see that whenever temperatures got higher, when practices got longer, that's when risk went up. So

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And people are in their worst shape because they've had the previous

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 19:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  months of summer where they weren't doing a damn thing.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And a lot of the research that had been done earlier showed that in order to do justice to preventing heat stroke, we had to make sure that the individuals were acclimatized to the environment in which they were practicing in. So one of the rules that we put into place was that they had to have five days of heat acclimatization. No equipment. All I could have on was just their helmet. Practice was limited to two hours. And they would get acclimatized to the hot weather that they're going to be participating in. Once we got through those five days, then we gradually lengthened practice. We gradually introduced equipment. But the key component was that we set up parameters

• 19:45Speaker 02

  that said that as the environment got hotter, because we knew that that was the most important influential factor. When the WBGT got to higher and higher levels, we had to change things. We would shorten practice, we would take equipment off, we would increase rest breaks, we would increase hydration breaks in order to allow the athletes to continue practicing. We didn't want to take that away, but we had to do things to mitigate that risk because we saw that from the three years of study of just looking at what the trends were. So we were able to look at that. I presented that to their rules committee and said, this is what I really think we need to do, all knowing that the rules committee, which was made up of football coaches that

• 20:30Speaker 02

  have been coaching 35, 40 years, you know, we've been praying football this way forever and, you know, we've been doing fine, kind of thing. Presented that information. Honestly, Gary, they, and Neil, and Chuck, all three of you, they probably discussed it for 20 minutes, came back and said, you know what, bud? We're going to put every single thing that you have suggested into policy because there's no way we can say it doesn't work because you have the facts. You have the data.

• 21:02Chuck Nice?

  There's also a little, also a little something called litigation.

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called litigation.

• 21:08Chuck Nice?

  Little something called litigation. It's like, well, you know, this guy came to you a few months ago with all this information and now you're...

• 21:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep. Plus, science, that's one of the objectives of science is to remove people's opinions.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And so, you know, the great thing about what we did was it was the first study that looked at the facts. We developed a policy based on those facts and to date, there hasn't been another state that has done the same thing that we've done.

• 21:41Chuck Nice?

  Well, I don't get that. So clearly, your research is out there. You took an...

• 21:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I know what it is. They're only Georgia rules. You see, that's the thing.

• 21:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're eating peaches in between plays. So other states, tell me about other states. Yes, exactly.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  So the state of South Carolina has, has taken a lot of what we've done and they have applied many of our rules to their state association. Florida and North Carolina.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Similar climate in South Carolina.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Similar climate. Florida and North Carolina take bits and pieces of what we've done and applied it to theirs. But by and large, the rest of the, the, the states across the continental and Hawaii and Alaska have not done anything like that at all.

• 22:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm in the north, why do I need you?

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Well.

• 22:31Chuck Nice?

  Uh, that's a, that's a great, I mean, that's kind of funny sounding, but that's a really good attitude question because you, you hear about heat deaths up here as well.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only recently, right?

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Well, you see more of them in, in the south. It does happen everywhere and, and we're seeing that, I think mainly because we're getting hotter and we're seeing areas in the north that are, are experiencing heat waves. Again, you know, the Corey Stringer Institute was founded on the death of Corey Stringer. That happened in Mankato, Minnesota. You can't get any further north than, than that area in Minnesota. And that was because they had a heat wave up there. So.

• 23:14Chuck Nice?

  So there was a, there was a young man that was, uh, clearly he had had a heat stroke, uh, here in New Jersey. Uh, I don't, I forget if it was last summer, but, uh, or the summer, I forget, but, um, and they, they put him in the, uh, they took all the ice in the Gatorade things and they literally submerged him in that. Is that part of your protocol?

• 23:39Speaker 02

  It is, it is. Our protocol is to immerse an individual into a cold tub, ice immersion bath where the temperature of the water is 50, 45 degrees. It is the fastest way to get the core temperature down. We need to get it down below about 102 before we would allow them to be transported by an ambulance or an EMT service or anything like that. And the problem is, is that ambulances don't have cooling mechanisms onboard and most hospitals are not set up to do that either. They have ice blankets they can put people on, but we're getting them submerged up to their neck in ice water. And it is the best way.

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Any good locker room is going to have unlimited supply of ice, right? For ice baths.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  They should. But, but, you know.

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put some ice on that.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  One of the rules that we have here in Georgia is that whenever the WBGT gets to 86, it's mandatory that that ice tub is onsite and ready to go.

• 24:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is WGBT? What is that?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Wet Bulb Globe Temperature.

• 24:45Chuck Nice?

  Wet Bulb Globe Temperature.

• 24:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me. On an abbreviation basis with it. Wet Bulb.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Globe Temperature.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Globe WBGT.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 24:55Gary O'Reilly?

  So Bud, if you've not been able to bring organizations towards your thinking as blocks, as states, particularly the northern states, have you found coaches in northern states come to you individually and dip into your program because they realize they've joined the dots and they've found out it's not a smiley face?

• 25:19Speaker 02

  It is, it is. I've had, I've done talks in Illinois and other northern states and they're very, very interested in that. They want to know what do we need to do to ensure that that doesn't happen? And I think that there is becoming more and more fear because there have been some cases recently where a student athlete has died from heat stroke and the parents have taken it to a criminal court case and the coaches have been charged with manslaughter. I mean, this is, this is not taken lightly. So I got a call from a reporter in Billings, Montana, and I'm somewhat familiar with Montana. I go skiing there every year.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  But they are experiencing a heat wave currently right now with their temperatures in the upper 90s, not common at all for Montana. And his question was, the coaches really don't know what to do. And so he sent me their policy that's in place. And the policy is looking at smoke because they have problems with wildfire up there. So what do you do when it gets really smoky? There are also policies in there on what you to do with hydration. So what should we do about hydration breaks? But it's during competition, not during practice. And what we know is that about 90 to 92% of all heat strokes in sports occur during

• 26:47Speaker 02

  practice, not during competition. So while they're saying we need to increase the hydration breaks during competition, they're not doing anything to address the times with which the risk is the greatest. And that's in practice. So. And of course, it's not a problem until it's a problem. Yeah. Right. And so now they get 90, 90 degree days. And they don't know what to do. With no precedent. They don't know what to do. They don't even know what to do. Exactly. Yep.

• 27:11Chuck Nice?

  And coaches are not the best people in the world to make compassionate decisions. Let's just be honest. It's like, you know, I think I'm having a heat stroke. Really? Well, drop it. Give me 20. Like, you know.

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My finger's dislocated. Pop it back in and get back out there.

• 27:30Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 27:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Bud, Bud, okay, so we've got people in Billings, Montana, who are acting like the British with three inches of snow and panic because they don't know what to do because it doesn't do that there. Now, this is going to replicate, I'm sure, as we go forward 10, 20 years time. Where do your rules advance with the climate as it changes?

• 27:53Speaker 02

  So glad you brought that up. I did a study with another friend of mine and he's a climatologist. And we actually looked at the United States as a whole and looked at average WBGT temperatures over the entire United States. And what we did was by averaging those, we were able to break the United States down into three geographical regions. Region one, region two, and region three. Region three would be the areas that have the highest values. That would be, you know, across the southeast and the south and into the southwest area. And then the region two would be in the center, more the Midwest Atlantic coast regions.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  And then region one would be up there with your Oregon's and your Minnesota's and your mains and New York's and things of that nature. I think the next step. is to then look at those three geographical regions and try to come up with better recommendations for those schools in those areas, knowing full well that in the event that somebody in Minnesota gets a day when it's 95 and 60% humidity and they're wearing full gear for a football game, something has to change. And, you know, the question was brought up earlier, was there pushback from coaches? And there was a little bit, but you know what? We are giving them an out by saying, we have things that you can

• 29:19Speaker 02

  do. We're not trying to cancel football. We're not trying to eliminate it. We're just trying to mitigate your risk. We can do things. Take some equipment off, shorten your practice.

• 29:30Chuck Nice?

  Why can't there be a standardization of what you've studied so that it just becomes basically the rules across everywhere? When we reach a certain temperature, you know, put these protocols into place. I mean, that would make everything really simple.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  It certainly would.

• 29:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called the Bud Protocol.

• 29:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, the Bud Protocol, right.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:53Chuck Nice?

  Gentlemen, I think we're gonna have to go to the Bud Protocol.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 30:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I get better. The Cooper Criterion.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Ooh, I like that. I like that.

• 30:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's better.

• 30:07Chuck Nice?

  I believe this calls for the Bud Protocol. No, sir. I think it calls for the Cooper Criterion.

• 30:15Chuck Nice?

  Don't try to show me up. They're the same damn thing.

• 30:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, isn't the World Cup someplace hot?

• 30:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, so we couldn't get it on the sun, so we took it to Qatar.

• 30:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 30:29Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know the sun put in a bid for the FIFA World Cup.

• 30:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, they did. They did, but they didn't win.

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun lost that one, okay.

• 30:37Gary O'Reilly?

  So the thing is, it goes to Qatar, as long as there's not a heatwave, you're gonna be facing eighties and seventies of average temperatures, humidities in the sixties and seventy percent. So what protocols do you think we should be looking for the organizers, FIFA putting in place, like hydration breaks in middle of halves? Or what do you envisage the teams being able to do to mitigate heat? And if it does get a heatwave, which is not unusual apparently, what could they do?

• 31:10Speaker 02

  You know, having scheduled hydration breaks is gonna be, gonna be a very critical. And, you know, we don't wanna ruin the spirit of the game by, you know, having a break in the middle of the first half at twenty minutes or whatever it might be, you know, to try to change the continuity of the game kind of thing. But really, Gary, the bigger aspect, and we actually see this, is that we need to ensure that the athletes that are gonna be participating in that World Cup are acclimatized to those conditions. That's the key. So I'll give you an example. In 2015, I was in Scotland on a study abroad trip.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  I had taken a group of grad students over there. But I met with the Olympic coaches for Team Scotland. They were extremely concerned about their distance runners being able to compete in the Rio de Janeiro Games because it is hot and it's humid in Brazil, and it's not that way in Scotland. And they were like, what do we need to do? You know, should we have-

• 32:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scotland not known for its rainforests.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Uh, no. And, you know, not to be slight on them, but it was like, should we make them go out and train with heavy coats on? So they can really get their core temperature up? And my answer was no, because that's not-

• 32:32Chuck Nice?

  Make them drink scotch.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  I like that. I like that.

• 32:36Chuck Nice?

  Run the whole race drinking scotch, that'll do it to ya.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  So, the, the, um, the recommendation that I gave to the folks in Scotland was, is you've got to get your athletes down to Brazil or to an environment that is similar in climate, so that their athletes can train. And it's gonna take them about 14 days for that to happen, so you're gonna have to pack them up and move them somewhere where it's hot and humid for about two weeks prior to the Olympic Games, so that their athletes are acclimatized. And I think that's, that is gonna be key to any country that is participating in, uh, the World Cup, is that they're-

• 33:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay Bud, I have a new business idea. We create a biodome, where we have complete control over the temperature, the, the radiant heat, and the humidity. And we dial in the averages for the location that people need to train, and they do it right there in the biodome.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  I like it.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you think of that?

• 33:31Speaker 02

  I like it. We actually do, uh, some research in an environmental chamber. We put either a stationary bike or a treadmill, where we can control the heat and humidity. And we do a lot of, uh, studies that way. But again, that doesn't mimic what a, what an athlete does on the soccer field or a football field, because they're doing very, very different things.

• 33:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need, in that dome, it has to be fields and tracks and things, right?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Yep, so it would have to be-

• 33:53Chuck Nice?

  Something tells me airfare might be a little cheaper.

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's my point, yeah. So, if there's one in Europe, one in North America, South America, you can train there before, and you, then you, you don't have to fly the whole team until you're actually ready to compete. And, and maybe you can dial it up a notch, make it even a little harder.

• 34:09Gary O'Reilly?

  That's an expensive project, Neil, if you're trying to replicate something the size of a soccer field or a football field.

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not more expensive than the money people have to spend on sports, I have come to judge.

• 34:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guys, we, we gotta call it quits here. My gosh. I know, sorry, I know, it's good stuff. I'm telling you, kinesiology is the thing. The, the folks have the physics literacy that makes everything, makes the world go round.

• 34:34Chuck Nice?

  Hey Bud, let me tell you something, and he's not blowing smoke, I've, over the years, I've heard Neil say this several times, about how much he loves kinesiology.

• 34:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 34:44Chuck Nice?

  And I'm like, Jesus, is there any level where you are not a nerd?

• 34:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I-

• 34:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we're, we're, so we think we should call it the Cooper Criterion, and you heard it here first, um, and, except- Bud Cooper came up with it. But it definitely sounds good, Cooper Criterion. Bud, we loved having you on the show. This is a, this is a work in progress, clearly. Because we're going to see what other aspects of your kinesiological expertise can serve the world of sports. Because they're looking for every way they can.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  The things that we brought up, it, obviously, we need a lot more research done to address some of the other areas of need as well, so.

• 35:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  In the meantime, put some ice on it.

• 35:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're going to let you go in this segment, but when we come back, we are going to look into the future of climate with a climate expert from Columbia University, Dr. Radley Horton, when StarTalk Sports Edition returns.

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. We're talking about heat. And we came out of the dungeon of heat strokes and the harm it's done athletes, especially those in high school, training in, in August, especially in football. And this is outdoor training, of course. And we thought we would sort of extend that into just a general understanding of the trends of heat waves. And so what do we need for that? We need a climatologist. And we didn't have to look far because Columbia University, right up the street from us, has experts. And we've got a Lamont Research Professor, Columbia University, Dr. Radley Horton. Radley, welcome to StarTalk. Great to be here again. Nice to see you.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not just any ordinary climate scientist. You specialize in climate extremes. Oh, to the extreme! I'm the X Games of Climate!

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The climate octagon. Which storm will win this year and what is? And your expertise says and your writings have gotten you on various

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  national and international task forces and committees to advise municipalities and nations on what they should do? So let's let's dovetail my first question to you with what we just saw in the first two segments.

• 37:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We we heard that in Atlanta, Georgia, they're they implemented these new rules, Bud's rules, the Cooper Criterion for keeping athletes alive, basically, not suffering from heat stroke. Is this a fact that will start surfacing in places where it never surfaced before? So everyone is going to have to start paying attention to Bud's rules?

• 37:46Speaker 04

  I think absolutely. You know, I'm talking more and more about sort of the two waves of climate change in a sense. I think we're approaching the point where most, but not all people, are realizing that the statistics of these extreme weather events like heat waves are already shifting quickly, right? We're getting more heat waves, longer lasting and just more extreme than than we thought. We knew that would happen, but what's also happening, I think, is this realization that it's actually happening much faster than we thought it would. We're not just getting that predicted, you know, 50% increase in the frequency of heat waves. We're getting unprecedented heat waves, three, four degrees warmer than anything

• 38:28Speaker 04

  that's ever been experienced in a place or arriving three or four decades earlier than we thought it would. So I think circling back to your question.

• 38:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean the once a century extreme event is not happening once a decade?

• 38:42Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly right.

• 38:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I said, it's funny, I had a conversation where somebody was talking about climate models. And I said, yeah, the only thing wrong with climate models is that they were all right. And that they didn't predict how fast it would happen, you know, and that's it.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  That's it. And I think it's frankly, a challenging point for some climate scientists, because we're used over the last 10 or 20 years to hear our models attacked. Climate change isn't real, that sort of thing. And now, of course, it's clearer than ever. Climate change is happening. We're the primary drivers of it. But we also need to simultaneously reflect on the fact that our models are lacking, but in that other direction. They're missing what we call these kind of tail risks, right? They actually don't do a real good job at predicting those lower probability, high consequence events. And unfortunately.

• 39:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you say tail risks, there's a lot in that phrase.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't mean biological tails off of animals. You mean?

• 39:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a distribution of any events, there's the tails of what happens that are much more extreme than what's in the middle. So it's a mathematical tail of a curve.

• 39:54Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 39:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what you're referring to.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 39:56Gary O'Reilly?

  So Radley, the ironic point for me, looking at it as a former athlete and someone who's going to be suffering heatwaves, the key solution to heat stroke is hydration. Meanwhile, we have extreme temperature rises. We are entering more and more heatwaves and droughts. So the simple question is, where is our water going to come from then in the future? If hydration is the solution to the problem.

• 40:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of aspects to that. Fortunately, you know, human consumption of water is a tiny amount of all the water we use. It's mostly things like mining, inefficient approaches to agriculture. But the broader.

• 40:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, also fracking uses a huge amount of water.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. But the broader point I think is really important, that we need to simultaneously be thinking about not just the higher temperatures, but how are these other climate variables changing at the same time? Are our crops, for example, going to be suffering from these more extreme temperatures that make it possible for more air to basically get sucked out of the atmosphere due to those high temperatures, precisely at times when there's not as much rainfall or our snowpack is melting earlier, so we don't have that water supply. So I think your point is absolutely right about shared risks across temperature and other changes in climate variables.

• 41:15Chuck Nice?

  Which by the way, just in case anybody's wondering, everything that Radley just said is already happening right now. Snow packs are melting quicker and then we're seeing shorter snow accumulation seasons and then we're seeing more rain that creates runoff where it should be snow melting very slowly. And what that does is it leads to an exacerbation of drought. So all of these things are working hand in hand to exacerbate the situation, but that's happening right now.

• 41:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait Chuck, that's why we have an expert to tell us?

• 41:54Speaker 04

  I think, I think he's

• 41:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck the meteorologist show.

• 42:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just thought I'd put it out there.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  He's making the points and he's doing so eloquently. So let's, uh, let's go with it.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before we get to Gary's questions, cause he's got a ton of them. I just want to slip in there. This notion that we have these models, could you explain what goes on when they show hurricane paths and they say we have the, you know, our models and the Europeans have models and they predict something different. I don't know that the public is ready to hear two entire continents of experts predict two things differently. I don't know that they know how to wrap their head around that. Could you just give us a few moments insight into what's going on? And how it is that an entire continent of scientists can have a different model from another continent?

• 42:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, totally. So, you know, how do we all think about uncertainty, right? The idea that we can have some things we understand really well, but there's always going to be some uncertainty in these nonlinearities, right? Where over time, an initial error in, you know, not knowing exactly where steering winds are going to be for the jet stream, you know, can sort of percolate over time, leading to two divergent solutions. So basically it's coming down to uncertainties about initial conditions to some extent. Us not knowing enough about the details of what's happening, say over the ocean right now. But then also how the models

• 43:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like the butterfly effect as they, as they I, I read an article, I thought to put this in there. There's this journal, I don't know if you guys know about it.

• 43:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Radley surely knows about it, but Gary and Chuck, there's a journal called the Journal of Irreproducible Results. Mm-hmm. And it's where hyperactive scientists who have crazy, fun, science-y ideas that are just completely inane, if they write it up, you can get it published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. So, one article was, was it Hurricane Andrew, or one of the really bad hurricanes? The scientist wrote, "They found the butterfly that caused the hurricane." And they studied the butterfly in this article. It was hilarious. Oh, God. This whole notion of the butterfly effect, that it could send the future results of a model in completely divergent directions.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  Right, right. And most of the time, you know, there's that cloud of uncertainty, but it's narrow enough that it can be very useful for planning, right? We can have a sense that there's a 20% chance that a stretch of the coastline would experience a hurricane. That's enough, usually, from a risk management perspective.

• 44:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But why are European scientists different from American scientists? I don't, I don't get that.

• 44:40Chuck Nice?

  Because European models always stop at the less advantaged countries and try to colonize them first.

• 44:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what that is.

• 44:50Gary O'Reilly?

  So, let me ask you, Radley, and just sort of spin it back into Bud's home turf, as it were. What do we think the southern states, the US, are gonna be experiencing weather-wise, climate-wise, in the next 10, 20 years? Because I can't see it staying where it is. I can only see it getting worse.

• 45:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why are you focusing on the southern states there, Gary?

• 45:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Because, because it's Bud's home turf.

• 45:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bud's, okay.

• 45:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Georgia, yeah.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  So, I mean, you know, I think, you know, one place to start is that's a part of the country where we also have these extremes of heat and humidity persisting into the evening hours, into the early morning. So, we need to be thinking not just about that worst moment of the day for heat and humidity. But the fact that, you know, if we're nudging up temperatures just a little bit and humidity up just a little bit, that means it's going to be harder to find time during the day to be able to exercise outdoors. It means it's going to be harder for people to recover at night, to sleep well. So in these places that are hot and humid to begin with, just shifting up those baselines, you know, will have a very profound effect. It could mean 20 or

• 45:59Speaker 04

  30 more days per year experiencing these extreme conditions. But I think it's also important to sort of consistent with some of the other things we've been talking about, look at some of the places where people might not think of those risks as being quite as severe. It might surprise people to know that roughly the highest combination of heat and humidity ever experienced up in Wisconsin. So it doesn't happen as frequently, but from this risk management perspective, if you're worried about that worst event per year, low probability, but catastrophic consequences, especially for people who aren't used to it, it's definitely not just the southeast. And even some places like the southwest, very hot and dry in terms of their climatology, but under the right, if you will, conditions.

• 46:42Speaker 04

  The Gulf of California, that water, you know, between the Sea of Cortez, essentially southern Mexico, that's some, northern Mexico, that's some of the hottest waters in the world. I had late August, early September, on the right, in the right conditions, plumes of moisture can actually make their way into those desert regions. It's not the typical day per year, but if we're not prepared, even, even at the LA region, can be, can be vulnerable to this. So what we need to find out is not just how will these average changes in climate affect this, but what about these wild cards? How hot are those bodies of water, like the Gulf of California, going to get in the future?

• 47:17Chuck Nice?

  Extreme.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  Persian Gulf. Exactly. How is irrigation going to, going to lead to more moisture in the atmosphere, crop practices?

• 47:24Chuck Nice?

  I think it's important for you to tell, just because when you talk about hot bodies of water, warming water temperatures during this time of year, whether it's in the Atlantic, what is that doing? And why is that important? Because, you know, I think when people hear about warming waters, they don't get, they don't get this correlation between these, these big storms.

• 47:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 47:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they're only thinking about warming air, right? That's the only thing they care about, right?

• 47:51Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah, so I mean, you know, issue number one certainly is the hurricanes and tropical cycles. As water temperatures get above a threshold around 80 Fahrenheit or so, it's much easier to get that energy pump going whereby winds from a storm causing evaporation of that very warm water, leading to a lot of evaporation. You basically can start a cycle where the sort of engine roars and you and you get a hurricane. Warmer the waters are, the more potential for a really powerful and devastating hurricane and landfall. But here, you know, another issue is the minimum temperatures in a lot of our coastal regions, even places like the Northeast US are very closely coupled to those water bodies nearby.

• 48:36Speaker 04

  And in a world where our coastal waters in August, September, these sort of warmest times of the year in the northern hemisphere, start to creep up a few degrees higher, maybe in ways that our climate models haven't predicted well, we increase the risk of more extremes of heat and humidity. And maybe also really heavy rain events, not just through hurricanes, but things like these atmospheric rivers, because the the the surface of the ocean is communicating with the atmosphere directly above, warm those waters. Not only does the air get warmer directly above it, there's the potential for a lot more of that moisture to evaporate into the air where it can cause catastrophe, right? Either through heavy rains or...

• 49:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If the air is warmer and we know that warmer air can can accommodate higher quantities of of water vapor or moisture, if it can accommodate it, why should that fall out? Why does it just stay there? Why doesn't it go up and then all drop out?

• 49:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's a great, that's a great point. I think the issue there is that it can be true that it can... So we're getting evaporation really sort of all over the world's oceans, right? And over the lakes, but it has the tendency to fall out as precipitation in very specific times, right? And very specific places. So the evaporation is happening everywhere, but trying to figure out exactly where it's going to rain out and how intense that is going to be is something that really can change with climate change. And the balance of evidence suggests that it's those really heavy rain events that are going to become that much worse, right? So we have our sewer systems designed to accommodate an inch or two of rainfall, you know, maybe in an hour tops.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  With climate change, if we start getting these four-inch-an-hour rainfall events like we seem to be seeing more and more, it has a nonlinear impact, right? It's not like flooding increases just a little bit. You can go from no flooding to really extreme flooding if our drainpipes aren't designed for that. So towards your question, I think, Neil, just to sort of step back a little more, I think this is at the cutting edge of a number of central climate impacts questions. A warmer atmosphere, which we're getting, can hold more moisture, but it won't always, right? So certain areas that are prone to being hot and humid, the southeast US, for example, coastal areas, we can expect those areas not just to warm, but also to get more humid.

• 50:58Speaker 04

  It's less clear what's going to happen in parts of the West, for example, right? Those areas maybe get higher. They don't necessarily get more moisture, more rainfall or more moisture in the air, but because they're hotter, they're going to suck moisture from crops, from forests. This is actually a recipe for these catastrophic wildfires and potential crop losses. And I talked earlier about the limitations of climate models for those tail risks. Now we have these communities trying to do impact assessment, right? What's going to happen to crop yields, forests, you know, the composition of trees.

• 51:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just the person dying in their attic, right? It's like the food chain and everything, right?

• 51:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. And we're missing the tails there too, right? Because our models inherently are too simplistic. They don't understand, and they don't understand the interactions between all these systems. What happens when the heat wave happens at the same time that air quality is suffering? Because you're getting more wildfires. What does that do to human health?

• 51:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bradley, if you know your models are simplistic, then make them more complicated. Duh.

• 51:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. Or, I think that's right.

• 52:04Chuck Nice?

  And while you're at it, while you're at it, how come you haven't solved quantum computing? What is your problem? What is your problem, Bradley?

• 52:10Speaker 04

  Can we throw that one back at Neil, maybe? I don't know. Yeah.

• 52:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, I, what I said was a joke. I mean, the problem is, and Bradley, correct me if I'm wrong. You could add more complexity, but the range of complexities you could add, you don't have constraints on what is the right complexity to add and what isn't. And you could end up getting wildly off results.

• 52:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're not judicious about it.

• 52:37Speaker 04

  That's right. I think, you know, one way to think about it is we need to invest more in individual models, get to higher spatial resolution, add new processes that let us, for example, simulate how changes in ecosystems as we get these higher temperatures and rainfall then feed back on the climate, right? Those changes.

• 52:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you need more probes in the ocean or in the air or in the forest?

• 53:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's an important piece, too. That would help with the point you raised earlier about the less, those initialization, what we call, what we know at the beginning errors that, you know, if we have mistakes at the beginning, they can percolate, become bigger errors later in a hurricane track. But, you know, I think we also need to, as we're improving models, step back in a qualitative way. There's this motion towards what are called storylines, just sort of stepping back and trying to understand all the ways that these systems interact, including the solutions, right? So, sit down with people who are health professionals, managing athletes, and say, what are the things that concern you the most? What keeps you up at night? And then we think about how all these systems fit together in a qualitative way.

• 53:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And with advice to do something about it. Gary, a few more minutes, but you had some questions loaded up. What do you have?

• 53:48Gary O'Reilly?

  I have, thank you. Uh, Radley, are we going to see things like hurricane seasons being extended and maybe moving further north to begin with? And our evolution as a species has been adapt and survive. What adaptations can we start to implement now while all of your data is getting harvested?

• 54:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we got to get going with adaptation right away. At the time of thinking, oh, we just reduce our emissions and we won't need to adapt, that's a false argument, right? Because partly because we have so many vulnerable communities right now, right? Let's think about all our people with the pre-existing health conditions, heart disease, renal failure, respiratory issues. These people need help right now, even before you think about heat waves. So what can we do? Everything in urban areas from more cooling centers. More advisories, getting the word out to communities where maybe English isn't a first language about the dangers of these of these heatwaves as they approach. Steps to increased shade, we talked about the radiant heating earlier. Those are some of the kind of things we can do.

• 54:53Speaker 04

  And I think also accommodating as much as we can, changes in the practice schedules or time of day for things like sports. But also, what about all the farmers out there who are having to work during these times of extreme heat.

• 55:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're suggesting is to use to, what you're suggesting is to use an acid rain proof umbrella as the solution to the acid rain. What, are you saying, are you saying we're [BLEEP] and we just have to, so I don't call this, I don't call this adapting. This is, this is, this is suffering under it, trying to mitigate loss. That's not adapting to it.

• 55:33Speaker 04

  That's, yeah, and I'm glad you made that point because all these attitudes, they're not cost free, right? If it was easy to do these things, people would have done them. And as we come up with these adaptations, we got to make sure they don't lead to the vulnerable suffering even more, right? Who's adapting first? Is it the wealthy? Is it venture capitalists who are getting access to information about what's going to flood first?

• 55:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Both of those. Or the countries that have the most access to fresh water? For example, or that's the new, is that the new oil of the future?

• 56:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:01Chuck Nice?

  And who often. Yeah, but everything you're saying is, is what we call resilience, which, you know, people talk in this term resilience because it sounds good. Nobody knows what the hell it is, but that's what it is. Everything you just said is what it's about because we are kind of screwed. Nobody wants to say it, but we are kind of screwed and we have to do both. We have to have mitigation and we also have to have adaptation at the same time.

• 56:28Speaker 04

  For sure. We got to make sure we're doing them in a sensible way where they're operating at, you know, sort of against each other. How do we do it in a way where the decisions we make for adaptation mitigation work together? Planning more trees, you know, for example, in a lot of places. But yeah, I mean, basically it's a negative narrative in a lot of ways, right? Climate change faster than we thought, these impacts on systems faster than we thought it. The key question is. Is there evidence out there that maybe there are some nonlinearities working in our favor on the solution space?

• 56:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 56:58Speaker 04

  Right?

• 56:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, that's what, go back now and figure those out.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then come back to StarTalk and say, here's a way that we can have a runaway process that's in our favor, rather than one that'll render us extinct or get rid of all of our coastal cities.

• 57:14Speaker 04

  Right. Young people who are, you know, pick their colleges, pick their jobs based on whether those entities are reducing their emissions, thinking about resilience of vulnerable communities.

• 57:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cultural shift.

• 57:26Speaker 04

  Investors.

• 57:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Priorities. Yes, yes, yes.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  Investors, people procuring, all those sorts of things. Yeah.

• 57:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so we gotta, we gotta land this plane. Bradley, just give us, can you say something positive before we go?

• 57:37Speaker 04

  I think it's that. I mean, my cliche would be the course I teach at Columbia, just seeing over the last 10 years, how students nowadays really do, you know, pick their colleges and their first jobs and where they're going to invest their money, on whether entities care about racial justice, whether they're focused on reducing emissions, whether it's thinking about their supply chains and their workers and their vulnerabilities. We're getting there, right? That's just the ivory tower, but, you know, if we're seeing that across society, I think we're a social species and we can see change quickly. And what we heard about, you know, in the first segment is a, is a critical example that we need what Bud was describing, the criterion, you know, to, to, you know, bo-virals the wrong phrase for it, but, but spread out and those kind of things.

• 58:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's beautiful. That's real, Bradley. I'm glad you're capable of saying beautiful things like that. It's not just all doom. So, thank you for taking.

• 58:29Chuck Nice?

  And then you top it off with, and by the way, we're all gonna die.

• 58:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're all gonna die. But Bradley, thanks for sharing some of your time with StarTalk, and you're a neighbor, so we might tap you again for some other ways you can contribute to our intensely interested audience in this topic.

• 58:49Speaker 04

  That'd be fantastic.

• 58:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, great to have you on. By the way, do you have a social media presence?

• 58:52Speaker 04

  I do, thank you. I'm on Twitter at @RadleyHorton.

• 58:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  @RadleyHorton, okay. All right, we'll see what gems you can share with us. But hopefully, it's advice on how to mitigate all of this, so that there's a world that our descendants can inherit and not be ashamed of who left it for them.

• 59:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 59:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, Chuck, good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. Pleasure. And Bradley, like I said, will find you again. We know where you live. That'd be great. Thank you. Neil deGrasse Tyson here for StarTalk Sports Edition. As always, I bid you keep looking up.