Introduction – This Might Be For You. Are you feeling anxious and confused about climate change? If so, I know something that might help ease your unease — an Earth-centered understanding of what climates are, where they come from, and why they must always be changing. This deeper understanding comes from knowing how Earth works as a natural system, what its history has been, and what lies ahead.
Episode 1 – Classroom Surprise. Understanding how the Earth works and what its history has been can help calm our fears and concerns about the climate future.
Episode 2 – Getting Grounded. Being a responsible planetary citizen requires that you discern and distinguish climate fact from climate fiction and avoid being steered by misinformation.
Episode 3 – Climate Kairos. Though very real and very challenging, the current climate crisis can be reframed as an opportunity to finally get things right for the remainder of the Anthropocene Epoch.
Episode 4 – Climate and Personality. The analogy between a human personality and an earthly climate is compelling. Both are fairly stable expectations based on past behaviors that emerge from previous events.
Episode 5 – Geophilia. Developing a love for Earth as a whole, requires that we acknowledge and try to overcome the implicit biases associated with focusing too narrowly on parts of the whole, i.e. the humanities, social sciences, and ecology.
Episode 6 – Land and Sea. Weather is powered by the sun. Earth’s climates are surface expressions of deep-seated, geothermal forces, for example the locations and elevations of land masses and the composition of the atmosphere as regulated by volcanic and tectonic processes.
Episode 7 – High and Low. Land elevation controls regional climate just as surely as does land location. The elevation of Earth’s surface topography is fundamentally controlled by crustal buoyancy above the denser, softer, upper mantle.
Episode 8 – Deep Time. Earth materials –rock, sediment, ice– contain an archive of climate change dating back 4.4 billion years. This is the context for modern climate change in the Anthropocene Epoch.
Episode 9 – Sweet Spot. To deal with climate change clearly, objectively, and dispassionately requires that we go beyond our anthrocentric, biocentric, and spiritual frames of reference to reach a geocentric one.
Episode 10 – Thinking Like a Planet. Earth is a unified natural system that’s been in continuous operation for 4.6 billion years. It’s most important subsystem on land is the called the critical zone, which extends from the top of the vegetation canopy to the base of circulating groundwater. This is the subsystem where rock, water, soil, biota, air, and humans are hopelessly entangled.
Episode 11 – Solid Earth. Earth is one of eight planets in the solar system and has a unique birth story. Attributes from its infancy continue to influence its climates today.
Episode 12 – Volatile Earth. Earth’s atmosphere consists of the volatile gasses that boiled out of the infant Earth, were dense enough to be retained by gravity, and were sheltered from being blown away by our magnetic field.
Episode 13 – Running the Show.The three great physical forces of gravity, centrifugal force, and geothermal heat operate from Earth’s iron center, the ideal focal point for climates powered by the sun.
Episode 14 – Carbon Underground. The vast majority of carbon in circulation on Earth is stored underground as limestone and buried organic carbon in the form of coal, oil, and gas that is often tapped as fossil fuels.
Episode 15 – Vulcan Exhales. The carbon in Earth’s underground reservoirs is returned to its atmosphere by the release of volcanic gasses at a rate that varies greatly. Without these exhalations, Earth would have long since frozen over.
Episode 16 – Earth’s Thermostat. Earth’s average surface temperature has been kept within a fairly narrow range owing to a stabilizing, feedback loop in which a rise in CO2 increases the rate at which it is removed by rock weathering
Episode 17 – Climate Clockwork. Earth history plays out with four kinds of time: the arrow-time of story narrative, the cycle-time of repeating events, the one-time of unique events that never happen again, and the all-time of universal constants that never change.
Episode 18 – Cosmic Climates. When defined more broadly, Earth’s climate also includes changes in radiation from the sun, pulses of radiation from other stars, changes in Earth’s magnetic field, and changes in the flux of extraterrestrial dust and asteroids coming our way.
Episode 19 – Energy Turning Points. The great singularities of organic evolution reveal that life has always been in search of more concentrated forms of energy. Humanity’s current obsession with fossil fuels follows a trend dating back to the origin of life.
Episode 20 – Chameleon Earth. Going green has become a cultural meme that preferences one color of nature over another, preferences terrestrial ecologists above other natural scientists, and misrepresents the bulk Earth history.
Episode 22 – Edge of the Sea. The apparently stability of the edge of the sea is an illusion created by the human propensity for short-term thinking. Within the Cenozoic Era, mean global sea level has continuously risen and fallen between +70 meters and -130 meters.
Episode 23 – Climate Future. Though rigorous scientific climate models can help us predict the climate future, they cannot take into account the unpredictability of human beings.
Episode 24 – Common Languages. Miscommunication occurs when the words World, Planet, Globe, Earth, and Nature are used interchangeably as synonyms. To effectively deal with the climate crisis, we must speak the same language. (Note: In this version, I mis-stated “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego” for Where’s Waldo. I’ll fix this in the next version.)
Addendum – Sources and Review. Source and review summary of Climate Underground podcast.