All tagged Science
Long Covid Action Project (LCAP) activists Corsi Rosenthal (CR) and Clean Air (CA), along with journalist and LCAP founder Joshua Pribanic, discuss the recent direct action CR and CA participated in to disrupt the National Institute of Health's (NIH) first meeting for the RECOVER Initiative, ostensibly created to "understand, treat, and prevent Long COVID" in the United States.
Epidemiologist and writer Abby Cartus joins me in this two-part interview to explore a fascinating set of questions: What does it mean for public health to fail? What does it mean for it to succeed? Also, I asked Abby to clarify the kinds of data that are collected—mainly from wastewater sites—and how that data is modeled and presented at this phase of the pandemic.
Abby Cartus writes about these subjects for her newsletter, Closed Form, and this interview is based on several of the essays she's produced for it. Due to time constraints, we ended up recording our entire discussion over the course of two days, and was released in two parts.
Ecologist and author Carl Safina returns to the podcast to discuss his newest book, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. Part memoir, part philosophical musing, Alfie and Me contains vignettes of ecological dreaming and profound critique.
Eliot Jacobson—climate science communicator and “know-it-all doomer”—joins me to discuss his eclectic background, why climate change data in 2023 was off the charts, and what it means to be a doomer at his stage of climate and ecological breakdown.
2023 was truly unprecedented, with record-breaking temperatures recorded across the globe. We know the planet we are living on has changed; this new world we are in is unrecognizable. It becomes harder to ignore and forget how fucked we are when you’re choking on putrid smoke for weeks on end; when the asphalt buckles under the stress of heat domes that last weeks; when basic food staples become unaffordable at the supermarket; when reports about “wet bulb temperatures” become common in the headlines; when millions of carcasses of sea life wash ashore on the beaches around the world; when climate scientists say things like “[t]his month was—in my professional opinion as a climate scientist—absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”
Atmospheric scientist Tim Garrett joins me to discuss, among other things, collapse. Contained within this hour-long interview, we cover the thermodynamics of civilizational growth and inevitable decline, the irrationality of dominant economic theory, Jevons Paradox, and his fascinating and wondrous study of clouds and snowflakes.
