Explore the basics of fossil-fueled climate change with hosts Zanagee and Olivia and special guest Dr. Heather Price. Let’s talk about the carbon budget and a livable future.
Explore the basics of fossil-fueled climate change with hosts Zanagee and Olivia and special guest Dr. Heather Price. Let’s talk about the carbon budget and a livable future.
You can learn more about Dr. Price’s work by visiting: talkclimate.org
Check out A Kids Book About Climate Change: HERE
There’s other great guides on what climate is for kids! We like this guide from the
New York Times: A Climate Change Guide for Kids
We also mentioned COP (“Conference of the Parties”). You can look up their organizing body here: UNFCCC
Check out this video about Mt. St. Helens eruption: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYla6q3is6w&ab_channel=SmithsonianChannel
1 Point 5: A Kids Climate Justice Podcast
S1 EP2 Why Is The Climate Changing?
[INTRODUCTION]
Zanagee: Hi there and welcome back to 1 Point 5: A Kids Podcast About Climate Justice! I’m Zanagee Artis.
Olivia: And I’m Olivia Greenspan.
Zanagee: And we believe that kids like you deserve a livable future.
Smart Speaker: A liveable future. This means a future where no one will have to worry if our planet is healthy enough for humans to live safe and happy lives.
Olivia: That’s Joanna. She’s our on-hand dictionary if we ever come to a word or phrase you might not know or understand already.
Zanagee: In our show we explore the challenges facing our planet with scientists, youth activists, and other environmental leaders who have experienced the realities of the climate crisis firsthand.
Olivia: So this is our second episode and I'm so excited because we're speaking with a very special person, Dr. Heather Price. She is a scientist and a professor, and most of all, she's an expert with a real gift for breaking down complex climate science and connecting it to issues of climate justice.
Zanagee: So basically, the perfect person for this show!
Olivia: Yes, exactly. So you might remember on our first episode, we talked about the fact that our planet is warming up, kind of how like your body warms up when you have a fever and how this is making our planet sick. And we call this phenomenon climate change.
Zanagee: So I'm guessing, you know, a bit about climate change already, since you're listening to this podcast and on today's episode, we're going to explore why the climate is changing. We'll talk about fossil fuels and how burning fossil fuels is contributing to the Earth's warming. And this is going to lead us into a conversation about greenhouse gases and Dr. Price will introduce a term that may be new to a number of you, a carbon budget. By the end of this episode, our goal is for you to have a clearer sense of what is making the earth heat up.
Take it away, Olivia.
[MEET THE GUESTS]
Olivia: Hi, Dr. Price. We're so happy you're here with us today.
Heather: Well, thank you again for having me today and My pronouns are she, her and I have been involved in the climate movement since the late nineties, when I was in graduate school. I live in Seattle, Washington.
Olivia: Could you tell us what your credentials are and what kind of scientist you are? Yeah.
Heather: I have a PhD in chemistry. When I went to college, I actually studied east Asian studies and Japanese. I didn't study science. I was what is considered a pre-med. So I was hoping to go into medical school and changed my mind part way through when I started taking chemistry classes and I ended up getting my PhD.
I have a doctorate in chemistry. And during working with Dr. Richard Gammon and my interest in climate, I then did my postdoctoral research with the program climate. So I am a climate scientist and I have been teaching chemistry and incorporating climate all the way through university faculty, community college faculty, mostly, and I'm helping them to incorporate climate justice and civic engagement across the curriculum.
Zanagee: We're going to talk about lots of things throughout this podcast, but we always want to ask people why addressing climate change is important to them. So would love to hear why this issue is so important to you, why you got involved.
Heather: Climate change it's been important to me ever since I first learned about it in graduate school from one of my advisors, Richard Gammon, he was a co-author of the very first IPCC report. So I learned my climate science from one of the climate scientists that literally wrote the book or compiled the book, as the case may be.
Smart Speaker: The IPCC stands for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is an international group of scientists that provides the most recent research on climate science. They publish widely-read reports on climate change that help to shape government policy.
Heather: And that really spurred my interest in climate action as well. So when I was in my twenties, I went to C.O.P. Six and, uh, Denhaug and was there with a number of other youth climate activists and fellow grad students. And we were able to attend the meeting. We heard talks on the science and on ethics and on the impact on people.
So that was when I was in graduate school. And then I chose for my postdoctoral research to work with the program on climate change at University of Washington. And that began in kind of the early to mid two thousands. And it's been a journey the whole time.
Zanagee: Yeah. Awesome. And actually just a follow up on that. So you talk about climate science as this inspiration, um, and you mentioned a cop, so, um, for people listening, that's a conference of parties, right. Um, C.O.P. And could you talk about what exactly that is and why that's so important?
Heather: So the conference of the parties, this is the international negotiations of the world government.
It's where the world governments are trying to figure out what to do about climate change. And it's a, you know, it's a challenging problem. They've been at this since 1990 and so far they're not succeeding, to be honest.
Zanagee: More from Dr. Price we return after this quick break.
[BREAK]
Zanagee: Welcome back to One Point Five, a Kids Podcast About Climate Justice. Let’s return to our conversation with Dr. Price about why our climate is changing.
Olivia: So, in the most simple terms, Dr. Price, what is climate change? Why do you believe it?
You know, you'll hear this from people who are skeptical, they'll say climate change has always been changing, right? It is part of the nature of our work.
Heather: You know, that is actually a really hard question because you'll hear this from people who are skeptical, they'll say climate change has always been changing, right? It is part of the nature of our planet, for the climate to change. When people talk about climate change today, though, what they're referring to is what I like to call fossil fueled climate change.
Smart Speaker: Fossil fuels. A fossil fuel is an energy source that burns to power things like our lights, refrigerators, and cars. Fossil fuels are made up of very old remains of dead plants and animals. Fossil fuels include coal, oil, and gas.
Heather: And even that doesn't answer exactly what's happening because it's also fueled by deforestation, land, use, change, things like that. For simplicity, I call it fossil fueled climate change because that's the biggest contributor to what's changing our climate today.
It's being controlled by people and particularly by rich people and rich countries. And, uh, it's that group that is causing climate change. And so far climate change has resulted in about 1.2 degrees change in the temperature, average globally, but things don't happen on an average. So if you go up into the Arctic, there's some parts of the Arctic that have already warmed four or five degrees, depending on where you go in the season.
Zanagee: When fossil fuels or fossil fueled climate change are discussed, you often hear the term “greenhouse gases” mentioned. We asked Dr. Price to help us understand what greenhouse gases are as well as their connection to climate change.
Heather: They're kind of the root of what has gotten us into this. The problem is that when fossil fuels are burned, they take oxygen out of the air and create carbon dioxide.
And many of you have probably heard carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It is the main greenhouse gas that scientists are concerned about for global warming, for climate change for causing climate change.
There's also other greenhouse gases that are fossil fuels, such as natural gas, which I don't call it “natural gas”. I call it methane because that's the chemical that is causing global warming and climate change.
Methane, it's a gas, whereas other fossil fuels like coal or oil. And these are really nice things that I bring into my classes because coal is a solid, so you can learn about solids.
Oil, like diesel or petrol or aviation fluid, those are liquids.
And then you have methane, so-called natural gas or fracked gas. If the gas and everybody who's ever played with a balloon knows that gases leak and they can pop. And depending on the type of gas, some of them are very explosive.
So methane, it leaks. And when it leaks, it's a greenhouse gas. So it goes into the atmosphere and it is, when it goes into the atmosphere, it's more than 86 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So this means that that natural gas, it's actually worse than coal or oil or petrol in terms of its climate warming and its impact on our climate and the temperatures. And I think a lot of people don't recognize, don't know that.
It's kind of new information for a lot of people.
Olivia: I'm hearing that greenhouse gases are gases. There's a collection of them and they have different levels that they impact the warming of the planet.
Why are they called greenhouse gases? And I think of greenhouse, I think of like this great environment that supports life, that grows plants.
Heather: Greenhouse gases. This is really interesting. And why is it called a greenhouse?
Greenhouse gases and this thing that we call the greenhouse effect. So let's talk about it from that greenhouse. If you go into a greenhouse, it's often much warmer than if you're standing outside the greenhouse. And so greenhouse gases kind of act like that greenhouse. They act like the glass on that greenhouse letting the sunlight come in and warm the inside of the greenhouse, but then it doesn't let that heat out. It keeps the heat inside. And greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide do the same thing. The more carbon dioxide, the more methane there is in the atmosphere because they don't escape out to space. They stay in our atmosphere and they build up and up and up kind of like the stuffing on your blanket.
So if you have more and more stuffing on your blanket or your jacket, you retain more of your heat. You stay warmer. The heat doesn't escape. Which is why we wear a coat or we wear a puffy jacket as it gets colder. So that’s how the greenhouse effect works.
Zanagee: We can think about these greenhouses on the whole global scale, right?
And there's these gases that are coming from our cars that are being emitted. When we turn on the lights and they go up into the atmosphere and they stay there. They just get trapped. They don't go to space. And that traps in the heat that's coming from the sun, right?
Heather: Yes. It traps in the heat and something I missed was it also traps the heat that's coming from the ground.
So if you've ever been outside on a hot day and you feel the ground, especially if there's asphalt or concrete, you can feel the heat coming off of the ground as well. And that heat is getting trapped in the atmosphere. So it's both.
Zanagee: Yeah, definitely. And definitely remember that when I was a kid playing outside, you'd feel the heat coming off the street and then also contributes to warming too.
Heather: We're at 1.2 degrees Celsius and uh, some scientists think this is already unsafe. And if you look out in the world, it seems a little unsafe to me with the forest fires and the flooding and the heat waves.
People are already dying from climate change today. It's already hurting people. So if we go to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or that has really big implications for human suffering and for animals suffering.
Smart Speaker: A carbon budget is the cumulative amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions permitted over a period of time to keep within a certain temperature threshold.
Olivia: Thanks Joanna. Yeah. So if you think about it, when you're on a budget, you have a limited amount of money. You can spend on an item. So let's say you had a clothing budget. That would be the amount of money that you could spend to buy new clothes over a specific period of time.
And the cost of the clothes limits your choices for what you can buy.
Zanagee: Exactly. So thinking about that, and similarly, a carbon budget limits, the choices of products or services that put carbon dioxide emissions into the air. If you overspend your clothing budget, you probably have to put some things back on the rack.
And if we overspend the carbon budget, we ended up causing greater harm to the environment.
Heather: Now to put that into perspective, we, as a world are putting about 40 gigatons into the atmosphere every single year. And that number to me, 40 gigatons, I'm like, okay, well, what does that mean? I don't know what the heck is a gigaton?
So I like to think of things in terms of volcanoes because I live in Washington and when I was a kid, I got to watch Mount St. Helens erupted and I, from my front porch, it was like this huge pyroclastic cloud that you could see. And if we think about all the emissions of carbon, all of those gigatons, those 40, about 40 gigatons of methane and carbon and all the greenhouse gases every year that happened coming from our homes and schools and buildings and airplanes and ships and everything.
It's more than the carbon dioxide that came out of Mount St. Helens if that eruption happened 10 times a day. 10 Mount St. Helens eruptions every day, any mission all year long and those that budget, right? We're going to use up at our current rate pretty quickly.
[CLIMATE JUSTICE GAME SHOW]
Olivia: Wow. I loved speaking with Dr. Price and I hope you enjoyed listening to our conversation. We're going to continue our conversation with Dr. Price next week, but for now, why don't we go over what we've discussed so far?
Zanagee: Yeah, let's go over what we've discussed so far. So it's time for CLIMATE! JUSTICE! GAME! SHOW!
So we'll ask you a question from today's episode, you can write down the answer on a piece of paper, think it to yourself, or shared a lab with whomever house is listening and we're going to play to right along with.
Olivia: Okay. Question one for you. What are fossil fuels?
Zanagee: Okay. Listeners. What are fossil fuels? Do you remember when Joanna shared this definition? Fossil fuels come from the remains of dead plants and animals, coal, oil, and methane are all.
Well, fossil fuels are burned. They produce energy. We also mentioned something else produced when they're burned. Do you remember what that is? Here's a hint gases that trap heat in our atmosphere.
Olivia, I know you remember what they are.
Olivia: I do remember learning this today from Dr. Price. So I believe I remember Dr. Price saying that greenhouse gases are kind of the root of what's gotten us into this. I also remember her mentioning that carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas that scientists are worried about when it comes to climate change, because greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, trap heat, and when they trap heat, they cause the earth atmosphere to warm much like a greenhouse trap.
Zanagee: Ding, ding, ding! That’s right!
Olivia: Wow, okay. It’s your turn Zanagee. Are you ready?
Zanagee: I’m ready.
Olivia: What is a carbon budget?
Zanagee: Oh, I had a feeling you were going to ask that!
Our carbon budget is a fancy way of saying the limit on how much carbon dioxide can be added to our atmosphere before it causes temperatures to rise. If we stay with our budget, the temperature will stay the same. But if we continue to exceed the carbon budget globally by adding too much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the earth will continue to warm.
Olivia: Bingo! You got it. I know you would get that one.
Okay, listeners. That’s all for Climate Justice Game Show! Thank you for playing with us! And remember—and this is the most important part—you, YOU, are learning new things just by listening.
Zanagee: Absolutely! We’re going to be exploring these topics throughout this entire season of 1 Point 5 and we’ll be building on your knowledge as we go. We invite you to revisit episodes at any point along the way! And always feel free to ask questions. We’ll give you an email address where you can contact us whenever you’d like.
[CLOSING]
Olivia: Thank you, listeners, for joining us today. And thanks to Dr. Price for sharing her incredible expertise on climate science with us. You can find out more about Dr. Price’s work by visiting talkclimate.org. We’ll also have a link in our show notes.
One Point Five is written by me, Olivia Greenspan
Zanagee: And me, Zanagee Artis.
Smart Speaker: With occasional support from me, Joanna, from Natural Readers dot com.
Olivia: Our show is edited and produced by Matthew Winner with help from Ari Mathae and the team at Sound On Studios. Our executive producer is Jelani Memory. And this show was brought to you by A Kids Podcast About.
Zanagee: This show is inspired by our book, A Kids Book About Climate Change, and the millions of young people around the world fighting for their right to a livable future.
Olivia: You can write to us at listen@akidspodcastabout.com. And check out other podcasts made for kids just like you by visiting akidsbookabout.com.