Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Let's not begin on the war today. One of our principles for doing the show during the war is to not let everything else that matters get lost. Today, we'll lead with another development that has global implications, and we're going to mention the war in Iran, but not center it. We're going to bring some new science on climate change that's big news in the scientific community, but hasn't broken out much into the general press or the general public.

New research published this month found that the rate of global warming has accelerated even faster than anticipated since 2015. The rate of warming has accelerated even faster than anticipated by the scientific models. That's after accounting for other phenomenon such as volcanic eruptions, solar radiation, and natural variability. Of course, with President Trump's return to office, sidelining green energy, starting a war with Iran, that has led some countries to return to burning more coal.

Our next guest writes that a number of the planet's systems are flashing warning signs. That guest is David Gelles, reporter on The New York Times climate team, who leads The Times Climate Forward newsletter and event series. His latest reporting is on that research and why scientists are saying several of the Earth's systems are changing faster than predicted as global temperatures rise. David, thanks for joining us for this. We noticed your article on The Times, and I said I want to talk to him about this. Welcome to WNYC.

David Gelles: Thanks for having me back, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: You write us about a study about the pace of global warming published on March 6th. That's the specific thing found that even after accounting for natural phenomena, like I said, such as volcanic eruption, solar radiation, and so on, the rate of global warming has accelerated since 2015. Can you walk us through some of those findings?

David Gelles: Well, it's simple but potentially really profound when it comes to the implications for the planet. The top line findings can't be described much more clearly than you just did, which is to say since we've been measuring global temperature increases, which have been increasing for many decades now, and as since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has injected planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The rate of warming, that is the pace at which the Earth's surface temperature appears to be rising, has actually increased; the warming is starting to occur even faster over the past decade.

If these findings stand up, and it's important to know that there's some disagreement in the scientific community, some scientists will quibble with some of these results. If that were the case, it would have really profound implications for what we can expect to occur in the decades ahead. That's the top-line finding that after many decades of continuously putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, there is a compounding effect that is occurring. The planet appears to be warming up faster now than it ever before.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners may know that the hottest year in recorded history was 2024. In fact, the 10 warmest years on record have been the last 10 years. We've discussed this on the show when the numbers came out, I think in every one of those 10 years. How can the pace of warming be even faster than the models that scientists already had? How much faster can it be going than making every year or each of the last 10 years the warmest years on record?

David Gelles: Just this granular understanding of the science that some of the researchers that I spent my time talking to for this article, I really come to appreciate the nuance that they bring to it, because what you just described is true. Each of the past 10 years have been the warmest 10 in recorded history, and 2024 was the warmest. There was a logarithmic step change warming that was occurring. What we're seeing now is, I don't want to say it's fully exponential, but the slope of that curve has ticked up over the last decade.

What that suggests to the scientists that I spoke with was that some of the compounding effects of all these planet-warming gases are kicking in. Not only is it just about the gases in the atmosphere are remaining there. Things like carbon dioxide take a long time to dissipate and continue to magnify the effects of the heat in the atmosphere on the planet.

Additionally, some of the planet's natural cooling mechanisms, things like the ocean and trees and other foliage's ability to draw down some of that heat, some of those mechanisms seem to be working less efficiently. At the same time, we have continued warming. At the same time, we have more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than any before. Some of the planet's natural cooling mechanisms look like they're being a little less efficient. All of that, the scientists say, is leading to this very troubling acceleration.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your questions about climate science welcome here. We're not going to talk so much about politics, though we will talk some about the political implications, the policy implications of these scientific findings. Mostly, your questions about climate science, welcome here. We know you're not afraid to get into the weeds about things.

Brian Lehrer Show listeners, we know you're not afraid of the science, you're not afraid of math. Your questions about climate science, welcome here. Actual science questions welcome for David Gelles, who covers climate for The New York Times, including the implications of this new report showing faster warming than many models had predicted, or anything else related. 212-433-WNYC as we continue to look more closely at what this, this report shows. 212-433-9692 call or text.

One place, David, that we might see the connection between heat trapped in the Earth's atmosphere and climate change is the ocean. As you note, oceans absorb more than 90% of the excess heat in the atmosphere, and they are warming at an accelerating rate. That's one of the findings. What's the latest science telling us about that?

David Gelles: Well, and here it's important to denote two fundamentally different things that we're talking about. That first paper that we just were discussing is about the rate of warming accelerating. Again, as I mentioned, there's still some debate about whether or not the actual rate of global temperature rise is actually accelerating. Everyone acknowledges each of the last 10, 11 years has been the hottest on record. This question, somewhat technical about if it's accelerating, some are still quibbling with that.

What there is very little debate about is the implications of the warming that has happened thus far. That leads us directly to the oceans. Ocean temperatures have been warming at an accelerating rate. We can talk about ocean temperatures, we can talk about glacier loss, we can talk about sea ice loss. The effects of global warming are indeed occurring at an accelerating rate. Those are also surprising scientists. We have the cause, if you will, this increase in global temperatures.

Then we have the effects, things like ocean heat, glacier loss, sea ice loss, biodiversity loss, those are also happening at an accelerating rate. The oceans. You just said it. The oceans have been one of the places where all that excess heat has gone. 91% or so of the excess heat in our atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans. New research suggests that the ocean's ability to absorb that heat and thus help to cool the planet is starting to diminish. That's raising big concerns among the scientific community as well.

Brian Lehrer: As a result, you're right, of this extra warming, Antarctic sea ice is also plummeting with the four lowest readings in the 47-year satellite record all occurring over the past four years. Can you talk about the latest and connect the melting glaciers to global sea level rise? Then I'm going to ask you to say why this should matter to anybody if we're just talking about ice and the height of the sea. Talk about those Antarctic sea ice plummeting stats and how they may be more surprising even to climate scientists than they would have imagined.

David Gelles: Well, all of these things are connected. As the atmosphere heats up and oceans heat up, glaciers and sea ice melt faster. As glaciers and sea ice melt at an accelerating rate, they reflect less of the sun's energy back into space. That was another way that Earth typically cooled itself. More of that energy is then being absorbed by the oceans, by the land, that then accelerates the warming. All of these systems are connected.

One of the things that I heard from so many scientists I spoke with for this article is that what they see is a real strain, not on any one specific point, not just a flashing warning sign in one data point, but that the entire web of systems as a whole all seem to be flashing warning signs simultaneously. That even in the five years or so that I've been covering climate change for The New York Times has led to a sense of alarm and concern among the scientific community that I hadn't quite picked up on until very recently.

You even mentioned something like sea levels. It's sea ice levels. It's in the four or five years since I've just been on this beat that we're starting to see real inflections in some of the data. All of that combined has led to a real sense among the scientific community, which was already pretty attuned to some of these challenges. That there is something really urgently troubling that's occurring, and they are trying to get the world to pay attention.

Brian Lehrer: Why should people in New Jersey or New Zealand or new anything care if Arctic sea ice is melting? How does it affect anyone's life?

David Gelles: Well, listen, Brian, I don't want to be hyperbolic here. The melting of a little bit of sea ice is not going to have a direct consequence on someone at the mall in New Jersey. In the aggregate, what we're talking about are these profound changes that are happening to Earth's natural systems. I think anyone in the United States or in just about any part of the world who's experienced extreme weather over the last several years can understand what that means.

As climate change continues and perhaps accelerates, what we're seeing is more extreme weather worldwide that includes more extreme heat, more extreme droughts, stronger storms, more destructive fires. All of that, again, is impacting lives, and livelihoods, and economies around the world. What we're talking about in this story is the underlying science that documents what trajectory we are on. At this point, we as a species are continuing to emit more greenhouse gases each year than every year before.

In fact, since 1997, which is when the Kyoto Protocols, one of the first big global agreements to try to limit greenhouse gases, since that agreement was signed, humanity has emitted more greenhouse gases since then than in all of combined history before. That again gives you a sense of just how it might be that the actual temperature increase is now accelerating. These things take some time to kick in, and scientists say we are now starting to reap what we have sown over all these decades.

Brian Lehrer: Here's David in Hopewell, New Jersey, with, I think, an actual science question that might relate to what you were just saying. David, you're on WNYC with David Gelles, who covers climate for The New York Times.

David: Hi, good morning, gentlemen. Thanks for taking my call. Actually, I have a comment rather than a question. Several years ago, I was on your call-in show, Brian, and my comment was that I didn't believe the predictions. I actually believed that things were going faster than prediction. I'm not surprised at all by the recent findings. Further, I think that the reason that it's difficult to predict is because the models are not keeping up.

Data is changing so quickly, and models rely on data that it makes it difficult for the models to make predictions on what's going to be happening, like tomorrow or in the future. Finally, I think that some of the decisions made by the administration are so counterintuitive in these times that I am just astounded. Those are my comments. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: David, thank you very much. Thinking anything listening to him. David?

David Gelles: Listen, he was prescient if he could see even back then that the models might not be entirely accurate and that, in fact, we might be blowing past the models. I guess the thing that most relevantly came to mind is something that he acknowledged at the end was that we have an administration right now that that not only dismisses climate science broadly. Has withdrawn from participation in international efforts to reduce emissions, but is in fact actively working to stymie clean, renewable energy in the United States and promote fossil fuels, which scientists have long understood as the main driver of this warming, which is jeopardizing and threatening so many ecosystems in the planet.

In fact, it was just this week, yesterday, I believe, that it was officially announced that the Trump administration would be paying $1 billion to TotalEnergies, a French company, so it would not build offshore wind farms off the coast of the East Coast and instead would be investing in oil and natural gas projects in Texas. I actually happen to be here at a-- I'm in England right now at a scientific gathering, and people are asking me questions about why it is this administration is making these choices.

It's not my job to explain, but what I do acknowledge is that those actions run absolutely counter to the science that United States government scientists have been signing off on for decades now. That the international community still understands is the fundamental bedrock of the climate science that has made clear for years that we are jeopardizing many of the fundamental systems that make life habitable on this planet by our continued burning of fossil fuels.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, the Trump billion-dollar story was on Morning Edition today, among other places. Some of our listeners might have heard it this morning. It is extraordinary. The government paying a billion dollars to a company not to build wind farms to increase the total amount of energy produced by renewables or the total amount of energy at all. I don't know, maybe they think they can replace the total amount with this drilling in Texas that you mentioned, that maybe they're going to do instead, but maybe that company would have done that anyway if the law permits.

It's still a billion-dollar buy-off not to produce non-greenhouse gas energy. Here's some pushback because one listener writes, "Climate change here in New Jersey, it snows when it's winter. We still have the four seasons. Please stop spreading false information. Earth has and will always change with or without us." Maybe, David, since this is a science segment, you can do some of the science on how they know, how scientists have concluded that it's human behavior that's primarily causing this.

David Gelles: Sure. Well, it's absolutely true that it still gets cold in the Northern Hemisphere during the winter, and it still is going to get hotter in the Northern Hemisphere during the summer. Climate change doesn't mean that everywhere on Earth is getting hotter all the time. What it does mean is that, on balance, the overall temperatures globally are increasing. If you look at maps that show the pace and location of temperature anomalies, which is to say times at which any given region of the world has been warmer than they were for the past 50 or 100 years before that.

We have pretty good records for a lot of this stuff, what you see is that up until roughly the middle of the 20th century, there were anomalies. Of course, some places would have heat waves, some places would have cold spells. What has happened in recent decades is just about everywhere in the world has started to experience sustained and regular heat anomalies. Which is just to say that it is getting hotter, on balance, just about everywhere on Earth, and some places, like the Arctic, are warming at a really accelerating rate.

How do we know that this is the result of human behavior? Well, two things it's important to note. The listener also notes that, yes, the Earth has heated up and cooled over the years over long, long periods of time. Tens of thousands, hundreds, millions of years. There have been ice ages before. We know this. The science tells us that. The science also makes it clear that two things are fundamentally different right now. Number one, we have meddled with the Earth's atmosphere by injecting greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, but also other planet-warming gases such as methane.

The amount of carbon dioxide and methane that we have injected into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels, through other industrial activities, through agriculture, is truly astonishing. We have not seen a jump like that at any point in the past tens of thousands of years. It's an absolute spike on all the charts that shows this sharp rise in the concentration of greenhouse gases of the atmosphere. What we have also seen, and the scientists understood this would happen more than 100 years ago, is simultaneously, with that, those global temperatures go straight up and to the right.

We know these two things are connected. Scientists understood this would happen 100 years ago. When you look at the concentration of planet-warming gases in the atmosphere, directly overlaid on this sharp increase in global temperatures, that for scientists is proof positive that we are tampering with our atmosphere. Yes, it may still snow in New Jersey from time to time, but on balance, we are living in a much hotter planet, and we are headed towards an even hotter one.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, my guest is David Gelles, who writes the Climate Forward newsletter for The New York Times. We're talking about data just published this month that finds the pace of global warming is proceeding a pace even faster than scientists predicted in the major climate models, many of which came out in 2015 around the time of the Paris climate accords. We're talking about the science as well as the implications of that faster pace of warming. Here's a question about the science.

Listener writes, "I see so much clean energy development over the last 10 years. Solar panels are everywhere. When I look down during a plane ride, I see electric cars, buses, trains, et cetera. Why is it that greenhouse gases are increasing? I guess it would have been far worse if we did not use clean energy as we are doing today."

There's the question. Despite the resistance from the Trump administration and the retrenchment from renewables, listener writes, "Solar panels are everywhere. I see electric cars, buses, trains. Why is it that greenhouse gases are increasing faster than scientists first thought they would, even in the light of that?"

David Gelles: Sure. Well, there's a lot to unpack in that question because it's a big, complicated world. The first thing I would note is that while it is true that clean energy and electric vehicles have been growing in the United States, they still represent a very small minority of the total energy produced in the United States. Yes, it has been increasing. That rate of growth has slowed over the last year and a half under this administration's policies, but they'll continue to grow. Still, we're not on a trajectory to fully phase out fossil fuels in the United States for decades and decades to come at this pace.

The other thing I'd note is that around the world, we are also seeing real growth in renewables in many places, but that around the world, countries like India, China, Russia still burn extraordinary volumes of fossil fuels, including the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal. We've tried to phase out coal to a large extent here in the United States, but in India and China in particular, there's still tons of coal being burned, and that is the most polluting of all the fossil fuels.

Even in a country like China, and we spent a lot of last year with my team here on the climate desk, along with my colleagues on the business desk, doing a big series about China's energy pathway and its future energy trajectory. While they are growing their renewables faster than any other country in the world, they are still using a huge amount of coal.

The answer is, why are we still on this pathway? It's because the world economy is enormous and complicated, and billions of people around the globe are still trying to live middle-class, upper-middle-class lives, much like the ones we enjoy here in the United States. That takes a lot of energy. We don't have nearly enough solar panels to make all that power, at least not yet.

Brian Lehrer: Getting back to the first caller's raising of the models and that the models always seem to him too conservative. Another listener writes, "Why don't we automatically factor in unknown unknowns when we calculate predictions. Scientists have been saying this is happening faster than we expected over and over as long as I can remember, for decades. Surely we have a system for taking that into account by now, and maybe it gets to something statistical about any prediction models."

If prediction models are generally based on what has happened in the past, we see their limitations in so many different fields. We're seeing it in this, I guess we see it in public opinion polling. With respect to elections. Oh, if this group of voters is going to vote similarly to the way they did in the past, then the election is going to come out that way. People don't always behave the way they did in the past. Same with athletes' performance, if we want to get down to that level thing with a lot less consequences for humanity.

Athletes don't always perform today the way they did yesterday. I wonder, this is probably a stupid question, but I'm just curious. Are there prediction markets on the pace of global warming? Does Polymarket or anything like that have anything on this from recent years? Have the people who placed bets been more accurate than the scientific models? Or is that a question that's out of your portfolio?

David Gelles: Brian, I think you just gave me my next story idea. [laughter] No, I have heard about some of these. I think, as you may know, Polymarket is not fully available to US users, or wasn't until very recently, perhaps. I have not personally spent a lot of time exploring Polymarket, let alone betting on it. It's something I wouldn't be allowed to do as a New York Times reporter. Listen, I think what this story taught me is that it would be a risk to presume I or anyone else knew exactly how this was going to play out. These scientists that I spoke with have been studying this for years and years, and they find themselves surprised.

To something, either this listener or maybe the one just before, raised there are these unknown unknowns, which is to say the Earth and all the ecosystems that make up this incredible web of life that we inhabit are complicated and interconnected. One of the things that has surprised me over the last recent years is how these issues that simply weren't on my radar and I think weren't on an oceanographer's radar or a soil scientist's radar, emerge and suddenly make a difference.

What I'm referring to is things like permafrost melting. As global temperatures rise, we are seeing permafrost. These areas of the Arctic tundra start to thaw. As they thaw, they release methane at quantities at paces that were surprising even to the scientists who understood this. That additional methane in the atmosphere starts to have downstream consequences and might, at the end of the day, accelerate warming, which would have other consequences.

As I reported this story, which looked not just at global warming but at all these other interconnected systems, it became really clear that that the models can only get us so far. It's really going to be the observed data as this unfolds in real time that is going to make clear to us just how consequential our tampering with the Earth's atmosphere has been, because these changes are starting to happen in real time, and they are starting to have real consequences for countries, and individuals, and communities all over the planet.

Brian Lehrer: That was a really interesting answer, and more interesting than whatever I asked about prediction markets. Ha, ha, ha. We'll continue in a minute with David Gelles, who's covering for The New York Times. This report that came out this month indicating that global warming is proceeding even faster than the existing scientific models did predict. Tarquin in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, has a very interesting-looking question about tipping points. We will ask when we come back from the break how the war in Iran plays into this, because apparently it does. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with David Gelles, who writes about climate for The New York Times, including in their newsletter Climate Forward, talking about new research published this month that found that the rate of global warming has accelerated even faster than scientists have anticipated since the Paris climate treaty in 2015. Tarkin in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Tarkin: Hi, Brian, I love you. I'm sitting in the parking lot of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. I'm about to do some skiing. Just as a quick aside, there is almost as much brown as there is white snow on the mountain, and it hasn't been below freezing even at night for the last week, which is totally unheard of. That's not my question. My question is around tipping points. I've heard about tipping points for years, and it's a very scary concept which makes perfect sense.

Like as the ice caps melt, not only do they release extra greenhouse gases, so regardless of what we do, we're going to have all this more tons of greenhouse gases released, to make it worse. Plus, they slide off the land into the water, raising the sea level. My question is, was there ever dates set that are agreed upon by scientists? At this point, we're too late to stop emitting ourselves. If there are dates, have they changed, and what would they be?

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for that. David, you hear the question.

David Gelles: I sure did. First, I think it's well worth noting the extraordinary weather that has happened across the western United States this year. I'll come to the tipping points question. Let's acknowledge that this was one of the warmest winters the west had ever seen. The traditional snowpack simply did not accumulate. Ski resorts across the region were forced to operate on limited capacity. Then, even when the snow did come, and California got a ton of snow a couple weeks ago, the heat that has arrived in the last couple weeks has been so intense that it melted almost that entire snowpack in a matter of days, at a moment when the snowpack is traditionally at its highest right now.

Now, of course, there's this heat dome which has been across much of the western United States, pushing temperatures near or even above 100 degrees even during the final days of winter. To an earlier listener who said it still snows in New Jersey. Well, yes, but what we're seeing across the globe are these what scientists would call once in a thousand year events, except they seem to be happening with frightening regularity.

To the issue of tipping points. There are a handful of tipping points, maybe a handful and a half of tipping points that scientists have identified. They are characterized as real abrupt changes to some of the systems on Earth that could be essentially irreversible, and that could have large cascading impacts. We've already mentioned some of them in this conversation. One of them is the thawing of permafrost. Another one is the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet. Another is the breakup of the West Antarctica ice.

Some others are shifts in the West African monsoon, the loss of Amazon rainforest, or the shutdown even of some of the Atlantic currents that carry warm air and energy up from the equatorial regions towards Europe. Scientists can't put a specific date on any one of these, but what they are doing is trying to track how likely it is any of these might occur in the next decades or century even. The truth is, for some of them, the science still suggests that they are quite far off. Things like the abrupt thawing of permafrost in its entirety.

They say we're a good ways off from something like that happening. For some of the others, though, there are signs that it's closer than they expected. Even a couple years ago, even a decade ago, things like the loss of the Amazon rainforest, rapid desertification, things like even changes to that Atlantic Current I mentioned. There are signs that the preconditions for real tipping points, especially those two happening, are starting to emerge again faster than scientists had expected. Now, what would happen if one of those tipping points actually was crossed? We don't totally know.

As we've discussed many times in this conversation, we're talking about a vast web of interconnected systems, and it's impossible to know exactly what would happen and how it would all play out. Again, on those last two, in particular, the shutdown of what's known as the AMOC, this Atlantic current that carries warm energy up to Europe, and the loss of the Amazon rainforest, there's growing concern that those two tipping points may be closer than we thought.

Brian Lehrer: The war you recently wrote, in addition to raising concerns about a humanitarian crisis and setting off a global energy crisis, the war in Iran is emerging as a major environmental disaster. Where does that fit in to what we're talking about? Does it at all, or is the war in Iran just too short-term a thing to even really belong in this conversation?

David Gelles: It absolutely belongs in this conversation. Of course, whenever we have a conversation about energy and climate in the context of war, I'm just always very quick to acknowledge the real suffering and horror that's going on on the ground right now. In no way is discussions of the emissions implications meant to take away from the reality of what people are living through right now. That said, the first time I wrote about this war was not in the context of global warming. It was in the context of environmental pollution.

As you may recall, a couple weeks ago, US and Israeli strikes hit oil depots around the Iranian capital of Tehran, and they turned the sky black. It was literally raining oil in a city of 9 million people. The gutters caught on fire because they were flowing with oil. I was seeing pictures on social media from Tehran residents posting pictures of their pets and their cars and their plants, essentially coated not with acid rain, but with real oil raining from the sky. I spent the next couple of days talking to doctors, other medical experts, and what they told me was that this is just a catastrophic medical emergency for the people of Tehran.

One doctor put it so profoundly, he said, "Imagine if an oil depot exploded in Manhattan." That's what we're talking about here. This initially was a environmental tragedy for the people of Iran, most directly. What, of course, has transpired over the last several weeks as we've settled into what people are describing as the worst energy crisis in modern history is cascading effects led to by the shutting of the Strait of Hormuz that are leading countries around the globe to return to using really dirty fossil fuels like coal.

We've reported this extensively in countries where they're having a harder time getting natural gas because supplies are getting constrained. They are firing back up coal-fired power plants. I think what so many proponents of clean energy are quick to point out is that you don't need the Strait of Hormuz to make a solar panel work. You don't need good relations with the government of Iran to have windmills blow.

The global energy crisis precipitated by this war has been proof positive for proponents of clean energy that it's more necessary now than ever before, not only for environmental reasons, but for geostrategic reasons, for energy security reasons, to have strong clean national energy strategies that allow countries to be less dependent on imported oil and gas. For people who then look at what this administration is doing, trying to stymie that industry, it's quite baffling for them.

Brian Lehrer: Last question. We know about the Trump administration push to sideline renewables and push more aggressive fossil fuel use. Is that just the US Thing?

David Gelles: It's largely the United States, but of course, where the United States goes, many other countries follow. What we have seen is the United States use natural gas and oil exports as a bargaining chip. As the energy secretary, as the treasury secretary have gone through Europe doing their swings, they are promoting US Oil and gas exports.

We see other countries following suit. Even the deal with TotalEnergies that we mentioned earlier, that's a French company that is committing to more oil and gas development in the United States. Whereas just a couple of months ago, they were trying to build clean energy right here. Many other countries, as I noted earlier, especially China, even though it's a big burner of coal, are racing ahead, trying to build as much clean energy as they can.

Yet, as this administration tries to turn back the clock and rebuild a energy industry that was dominant in the 20th century, as much of the rest of the world tries to move to an energy system for the 21st century. Some countries, some companies are following this administration's lead and going back to the fossil fuels that have been responsible for all this global warming thus far.

Brian Lehrer: Well, listeners, we bring the science on Tuesdays. This is one of the things we've chosen for ourselves as the format of this show. Bring the science Tuesdays on climate and other public health topics. For today, we've had David Gelles, reporter on The New York Times Climate team, who leads The Times Climate Forward newsletter and event series. David, thank you so much for coming on and enlightening us about these new scientific findings.

David Gelles: Thanks for having me, Brian.

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