Arts, Faculty of
Non UBC
Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies, Department of
DSpace
Bowers, Katherine
Rae, James
Davies, Althea
O'Rourke, Stephanie
Burke, Andrea
Bradley, Bridget
Thinking Climate Change is a series of interviews with researchers at the University of St Andrews (Scotland) that considers the ways their work addresses questions related to climate change and the climate crisis. Guests include Dr James Rae (Earth Science), Dr Althea Davies (Paleoecology), Dr Stephanie O’Rourke (Art History), Dr Andrea Burke (Geochemistry and Paleoclimatology), and Dr Bridget Bradley (Social Anthropology). Each episode focuses on one researcher’s work. The podcast explores approaches to understanding climate change from a variety of disciplines. This project was supported by a 2023 British Academy Visiting Fellowship.
Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 1 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. James Rae is an earth scientist and Reader at the University Of St Andrews. His research investigates Earth's past climate history using geochemical measurements on archives including sediments, fossils and ice cores.So thank you so much for joining me today. Could you please tell us a little about your current research project?James RaeYeah, for sure. So my research looks at the history of Earth's climate to try and understand better where we're headed in the future. There's a couple of big flavors to this. One is, I look at the ice ages. These are times that are quite recently in Earth's history--that is recently for a geologist, right? A mere thousand years ago, there was a kilometer of ice on top of where I'm currently sat here in St Andrews, and a very different climate, lower CO2, an altered ocean circulation state, changes in biotas. It was the last time that climate was really really different. And so by looking at those altered climate states we can try and better understand how our climate system operates.And then the other flavor of my research, again looking at different climates in the past, but rather than the cold climates of the ice age looking at the warmer climates of the more distant geological past, and there our key aim is to find out an answer to what is I think a really fundamental question which is, CO2 today is at 423 parts per million in the atmosphere. It's the key driver of modern climate change. What did our planet look like the last time that it had 423 ppms in the atmosphere? And so to do that we are making long-term reconstructions of atmospheric CO2 and then we're looking at the climate states associated with those different CO2 levels.Katherine BowersSo what kind of questions are you asking and how do you go about finding answers for them?James RaeSo the big question on CO2 is--we've done this incredible thing to the planet, right? We're running this wild experiment and we are right in the middle of it and it hasn't finished, right? Even if we were to stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere today, our planet is still playing catch up, our climate system is playing catch up, to equilibrate with 420ppm of CO2. Why does it take a bit of time to catch up to that level of CO2? Well one easy way to think about this is, it takes a long time to heat up water, and water in the bottom of the ocean has been there for a thousand years so it doesn't know anything about climate change. It gets upwells, goes, oh my goodness it got warmer up here, and it sucks out a little bit of heat from the atmosphere. So it takes our climate system some time to equilibrate with elevated CO2, and we want to know, what will the results of that experiment look like, by the time the climate equilibrates to higher CO2 levels?So one way of doing that is, you can ask that question to a computer model, dial up CO2, and you can ask this question to the your best representation of Earth's climate system as we can do it in the form of a whole load of equations: what does our planet look like with CO2? And models do an amazing job of a bunch of aspects of our climate system, but as we try and get to these really long timescales, they're both quite difficult to run, and there are uncertainties on the things like the behavior of big ice sheets that are still tricky questions for us to grapple with.So a complimentary way to try and answer this question is to look at Earth's past, so I guess my very specific question is, what time is CO2 420ppm? And how we go about answering that is, we need to find something that was around way back in the geological past that recorded atmospheric CO2 levels. And this is quite a tough nut to crack. For the last million years you've got these beautiful records like the fossil record of the atmosphere which is made up of bubbles in Antarctic ice cores, and that's great, but only for the last million years, and most of the last million years has been colder than present. It was in and out of an ice age. And then beyond a million years we just run out of ice, most of it has melted or flowed away, so we need a different archive to look at.The archive that I'm engaged in, you're interrogating, is the record of deep sea mud from the deep ocean floor, and in particular when you take that mud and you wash it, which sounds like a pretty, I don't know, boring or perhaps kind of esoteric thing to do, mud washing--it's actually something that I employ a bunch of undergraduates to do because it's not the most interesting work, but it's super important--because when you wash that mud and you get out all the really fine clay particles, what you see is something that looks like sand, and when you put it under a microscope you see that that sand is actually made up of millions of tiny shells. And because these shells are growing in sea water, they're plankton, essentially, so they're growing in the surface of the ocean and they're growing from the chemicals available to them in the surface of the ocean, those chemicals in the surface of the ocean are strongly impacted, if you look at the right ones, by the level of CO2 in that water.And we, to be very specific, look at the boron isotope composition of these shells. I'm a card-carrying Boron Moron, both boring and moronic, according to my friends and family. But the wonderful thing about these boron isotopes is that they give you this beautiful record of CO2 change in waters. You can equate that to CO2 change in the atmosphere, and so by measuring those shells down through layers of sediment in the deep ocean you can read back through the history of CO2 change in the atmosphere like going in through the pages of a book.Katherine BowersSo how do you get mud from the deep ocean?James RaeThere's a variety of different ways you can do this but essentially all of them involve dropping something that looks a bit like a drain pipe off the side of a ship and pulling it back up. If you want just a little bit of mud you can use really something not far off a drain pipe, but if we want to go deeper in time you use ocean drilling until you drill a core way down kilometers through the sediment to bring up older and older mud.Katherine BowersI have also a question about mud washing. So my mental image of this is when you wash mud it would just like wash away, but sediment is left. So what is mud in that sense, then?James RaeI'm using mud as, you know, my really strict sedimentary geologist colleagues wouldn't be very happy with me, I'm being a bit loose here. I'd say we're washing sediment, and we're washing it through a fine, fine sieve, right? So a sieve where each of the holes in that sieve is about 6% the size of a millimeter, and so this gets rid of really really fine clay. So kind of super microscopic mud, and it leaves behind anything that is sand-sized.And to be a bit geological about this: we're used to seeing sand on beaches. The reason for this is particles that are about as big and as heavy as sand can go down a river where the flow is quite fast, but when it hits the sea, there's no longer the same kind of fast current flow as you have in a river, and so it drops out and that's why we have beaches.So if you find sand-sized material in the middle of the open ocean, it can't have come from on land, because it would have gone down into a beach, and often we're dealing with thousands of kilometers away from land. So we know it must have come from directly above us, and so it must be made by biology. There are a couple of rare instances where you find sand or even gravel in the middle of the ocean. The only way of doing that is occasionally on the very certain, very cold conditions sand gets rafted in by icebergs, but that's a kind of unique case.Katherine BowersThat is actually very helpful for getting a visual of the work that you're doing. It's kind of hard to visualize before but now I feel like I understand it a bit better.James RaeAnd I guess I'd like to add one aspect to that. We wash a lot of mud, but then we do things that probably visually are actually much more exciting. So step one is look under a microscope at these gorgeous microfossil shells, and pick out certain species. Step two, go into a super super super clean lab where we wear white forensic suits so that we don't contaminate our samples, and we do chemical treatments on them, we dissolve up the shells, we purify out the boron which we're interested in measuring. And then step three, we put that through an enormous instrument, it's a bit like a mini version of a particle accelerator. It turns our sample into ions, it fires those down through a vacuum that's a bit like space, makes them bend a corner with a massive magnet and detects these tiny isotopic signals.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?James RaeI've always been interested in Earth's environment, in the outdoors, in nature ever since I was a kid. At school I really liked the bit of exposure I had to the earth sciences through physical geography. I liked being able to go on a walk in the hills in Scotland and understand that the glens there are formed by ancient glaciers from the last ice age, and I wanted to do more of that and to pair my interests in the sciences in particular in chemistry with our understanding of the planet and ideally with a view to understanding climate change, and so that led me to a degree in earth sciences. I absolutely loved it. And as a result I guess I've been at university ever since doing this kind of work.And this project on past climate change in particular just feels like this is something that I have been fascinated by ever since I first found out about it. I am concerned about climate change, I want to do something about it, and as somebody with some chemistry expertise and somebody who understands a bit about Earth's history, beginning to apply chemistry to Earth's history in order to better understand how our planet's climate works, seems like a good meshing together of those skills.Katherine BowersSo what is an unexpected connection that you've made in your work or that you've come across in your work?James RaeSo for this I'm gonna actually talk about a different flavor of looking at Earth's past climate. So moving away from CO2 and thinking again about the ice ages, one of the key processes that's involved in climate and indeed CO2 change during the ice ages are big changes in the ocean's circulation. So we might think of one of the most famous examples of a big current system is the one in the North Atlantic Ocean, we've got the gulf stream which brings tropical water from the Caribbean all the way up to the shores of Scotland, and means that the climate of Scotland today is much milder than the climate of Alaska despite being at a fairly similar latitude. And that's because the Atlantic has this conveyor belt type circulation that brings this warm water north. But today the pacific doesn't have a circulation system like that, and we wanted to investigate, how did the ocean circulation look during the last ice age? And we found, really to our surprise, that during the last ice age the Pacific had one of these conveyor belt type circulations a bit like the modern day Atlantic, and there's a number of cool things about this. I think the really unexpected thing was we realized that, oh my goodness, we can reconstruct the temperature of the north Pacific during the ice age, and it was actually warmer than it was today, despite the fact that the world has plunged into this ice age, because this current system is kicked off you get this warmer-than-present-day temperature.And the neat thing about a really kind of random research connection is that we realized that there was this longstanding debate in the archaeological and anthropological literature about the first settlers in North America, the first human settlers in North America, so how did the Native Americans get to North America. Broadly speaking, people all started out in Africa and moved up through Asia, and you can see that, if you look at the genetics, there is similarity in the genetics of Native American people to Asian people until about 25,000 years ago. But then there's a kind of separation if you look at the genetic coding, and you can see that there was no longer much mixing of the original Asian populations with the founding population of the original North Americans for about, you know, 5,000 to 10,000 years, and yet there's no evidence at that time that they were in America itself. So the question is, where were they, if they're no longer intermixing with their Asian ancestors but they're not yet in North America--because it would have been really hard to get to North America given the huge ice sheets covering the rockies--where were they?And so this has led to this interesting idea of the Beringian Standstill, which is that where the Bering Strait now is between Alaska and Siberia, sea level during the last ice age was actually so low that that was land. And so the idea is that people got up into this bit of land in Beringia and they hung out there for five or eight thousand years. The question has always been, what on Earth would you be doing up there during the last ice age, right? Alaska and Siberia, not habitable climates today, and your assumption would be that these would be even more harsh in the peak of the last ice age, and yet there's always been this interesting evidence that based on pollen data the climate in that region looked surprisingly mild. And the research connection that we made was that actually we think we can explain that mild climate that allowed those early human populations to inhabit Beringia for thousands of years due to the presence of this enhanced circulation system, which meant that rather than Beringia having a climate like a more harsh version of modern day Alaska, it would have looked a bit more like Scotland. And, you know, while some would argue that Scotland is perhaps barely habitable today, it's at least a very different climate system compared to Alaska.Katherine BowersThat's so interesting.James RaeI was just fascinated to stumble across this. I think it shows the value of just trying to keep a bit of a track on the literature. It was spotting a paper that came out on the genetics of ancestral North Americans, and the link to the Beringia Standstill hypothesis. This came out and in Science just at the time that I was thinking about these data from the North Pacific, and I went, wow, I wonder if I've got an explanation for that? And I tried to read up in the literature, but I'm not an archaeologist or an anthropologist by any stretch, so I wasn't that sure about this idea. Would it really hold water? What would that community think of this? And I just happened, at a conference the next summer, to sit next to, at lunch, an anthropologist who studies this exact question. And I was like, oh hey, by the way, I've got an idea about this, what do you think? And he was into it and came on board the paper to help add some expertise on this topic.Katherine BowersSo how does your work help us think about the climate emergency?James RaeI think the key way that our work helps us think about the climate emergency is giving this quite tangible picture of what our planet looks like under elevated CO2 levels. So I've talked about using these boron measurements to find out what time our planet last had a CO2 level as high as 420ppm, and the answer to that is it's about three million years ago, it's a time called the mid-pliocene warm period. And despite the fact that planet Earth looks at first order fairly similar today--the continents are in the same places, it's prior to the evolution of the human genus but it's a world dominated by mammals--but the one key difference is that CO2 is higher, and as a result there is very little ice on Greenland and there's very little ice on west Antarctica, indeed there's a forest of beech trees on the Antarctic peninsula. And as a result of that ice melt, sea level globally is at least ten meters higher than it was today, and ten meters is comfortably enough to flood all of our major coastal cities.And so this shows us I think in quite a tangible way, this doesn't rely on computer modeling, this is just a way that our planet looks when CO2 was this high, the last time in Earth's history. This is our direction of travel. We are not there yet because it takes the climate system time to catch up with elevated CO2 levels, but if we allow CO2 to persist at this elevated level, we risk heading back to the pliocene with that huge loss of ice sheets and that huge rise in sea level. So this really I hope motivates us to make sure that doesn't happen. We do have a window of time to make sure that happened. We have to put less CO2 in the atmosphere. We probably, also, have to actively take CO2 back out of the atmosphere. If we do that quick enough, there is a window to try and avoid that catastrophic melting of mass ice sheets.Katherine BowersWell, reassuring that there is some window at least because in many news reports, it seems like that that window is, I mean I know it's small, but it seems like it's shrinking rapidly.James RaeI mean there's a variety of different windows. I think an important point actually is that there's no one window which when it closes all is lost. Climate change is a steep slope that we tumble down, I don't think it's a cliff edge that we fall off. You know, 1.5° would be great, 1.6 though would be better than 1.7 and 1.7 would be better than 1.8. There is the sliding scale of impacts. Hey if we get to 2.2° there will be a whole bunch of really serious impacts, I mean we are seeing those climate impacts today at 1.2°, 1.3°, we will see more and more of them. But my goodness they will be less extreme and less severe than the climate impacts at 3° of warming. So there's always a window to make things better. The best time to reduce emissions was yesterday, but failing that, today and tomorrow.Katherine BowersWhat can earth science as a discipline contribute to the discourse around climate change today?James RaeEarth science is right at the core of climate change research. The physical science basis of the IPCC reports, this is done by earth scientists. And I think that that's a link that isn't always well understood by the public actually, that the public kind of knows about climate change, might know about the IPCC reports, you know, the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, but has this feel for this is done by climate scientists. But who are climate scientists, where do they sit? If you want to be a climate scientist, what do you study at university? And the answer typically is earth sciences or earth and environmental sciences. And so within our school we have people looking at, how will the monsoon system evolve in the future? Or what's predicted to happen to heat waves and floods? Or if a massive volcano goes off, what will that do to Earth's climate? Or how is CO2 taken up by the ocean and what impacts does that have on marine life? So we're understanding the problem from a whole range of different angles.Earth sciences is also going to be a huge part of the solution, and there's two flavors to that. The first is we need to decarbonize our energy system. That is the most important single thing to do to fix climate change. And that's going to involve digging, no more coal and oil and gas out the ground, but we will need to dig out lithium and niobium and neodemium and cobalt and all of these weird and wonderful metals that we need for green energy technologies. So that raw material requirement to decarbonize the energy system, that's a huge contribution that earth scientists, geologists in particular, will make to fixing climate change.And then the other one is, we are a field where we have the expertise to understand, what does our planet do with elevated CO2? CO2 has gone up in the atmosphere before due to big volcanoes going off, due to the release of methane from methane gas hydrates. It's never done this as quickly as it's happening now, but CO2 has gone up before and then it's come back down again, and it comes back down because it goes into trees and plants, it dissolves into the ocean, and then it reacts with rocks, both rocks on the seafloor and rocks around us on the continents. And so earth scientists are now looking at each of those processes and thinking, are there any of these that we can speed up? This is difficult stuff. There's difficult important ethical questions to ask around this. But they're important ones to think about. In all of the scenarios that the IPCC has that get us to 1.5°C or even 2°C there's a lot of this carbon dioxide removal going on. And earth scientists are the people who are grappling with how we might be able to do that.Katherine BowersThank you so much for speaking with me today. If the people want to find you, where can they find you and your work?James RaeLook me up, I'm on social media under "Mud Water Climates" because those are things that I do, and of course you can Google me, James Rae, I'm working at the University of St Andrews, I'm easy enough to find online.Katherine BowersThinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 1 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. James Rae is an earth scientist and Reader at the University Of St Andrews. His research investigates Earth's past climate history using geochemical measurements on archives including sediments, fossils and ice cores.So thank you so much for joining me today. Could you please tell us a little about your current research project?James RaeYeah, for sure. So my research looks at the history of Earth's climate to try and understand better where we're headed in the future. There's a couple of big flavors to this. One is, I look at the ice ages. These are times that are quite recently in Earth's history--that is recently for a geologist, right? A mere thousand years ago, there was a kilometer of ice on top of where I'm currently sat here in St Andrews, and a very different climate, lower CO2, an altered ocean circulation state, changes in biotas. It was the last time that climate was really really different. And so by looking at those altered climate states we can try and better understand how our climate system operates.And then the other flavor of my research, again looking at different climates in the past, but rather than the cold climates of the ice age looking at the warmer climates of the more distant geological past, and there our key aim is to find out an answer to what is I think a really fundamental question which is, CO2 today is at 423 parts per million in the atmosphere. It's the key driver of modern climate change. What did our planet look like the last time that it had 423 ppms in the atmosphere? And so to do that we are making long-term reconstructions of atmospheric CO2 and then we're looking at the climate states associated with those different CO2 levels.Katherine BowersSo what kind of questions are you asking and how do you go about finding answers for them?James RaeSo the big question on CO2 is--we've done this incredible thing to the planet, right? We're running this wild experiment and we are right in the middle of it and it hasn't finished, right? Even if we were to stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere today, our planet is still playing catch up, our climate system is playing catch up, to equilibrate with 420ppm of CO2. Why does it take a bit of time to catch up to that level of CO2? Well one easy way to think about this is, it takes a long time to heat up water, and water in the bottom of the ocean has been there for a thousand years so it doesn't know anything about climate change. It gets upwells, goes, oh my goodness it got warmer up here, and it sucks out a little bit of heat from the atmosphere. So it takes our climate system some time to equilibrate with elevated CO2, and we want to know, what will the results of that experiment look like, by the time the climate equilibrates to higher CO2 levels?So one way of doing that is, you can ask that question to a computer model, dial up CO2, and you can ask this question to the your best representation of Earth's climate system as we can do it in the form of a whole load of equations: what does our planet look like with CO2? And models do an amazing job of a bunch of aspects of our climate system, but as we try and get to these really long timescales, they're both quite difficult to run, and there are uncertainties on the things like the behavior of big ice sheets that are still tricky questions for us to grapple with.So a complimentary way to try and answer this question is to look at Earth's past, so I guess my very specific question is, what time is CO2 420ppm? And how we go about answering that is, we need to find something that was around way back in the geological past that recorded atmospheric CO2 levels. And this is quite a tough nut to crack. For the last million years you've got these beautiful records like the fossil record of the atmosphere which is made up of bubbles in Antarctic ice cores, and that's great, but only for the last million years, and most of the last million years has been colder than present. It was in and out of an ice age. And then beyond a million years we just run out of ice, most of it has melted or flowed away, so we need a different archive to look at.The archive that I'm engaged in, you're interrogating, is the record of deep sea mud from the deep ocean floor, and in particular when you take that mud and you wash it, which sounds like a pretty, I don't know, boring or perhaps kind of esoteric thing to do, mud washing--it's actually something that I employ a bunch of undergraduates to do because it's not the most interesting work, but it's super important--because when you wash that mud and you get out all the really fine clay particles, what you see is something that looks like sand, and when you put it under a microscope you see that that sand is actually made up of millions of tiny shells. And because these shells are growing in sea water, they're plankton, essentially, so they're growing in the surface of the ocean and they're growing from the chemicals available to them in the surface of the ocean, those chemicals in the surface of the ocean are strongly impacted, if you look at the right ones, by the level of CO2 in that water.And we, to be very specific, look at the boron isotope composition of these shells. I'm a card-carrying Boron Moron, both boring and moronic, according to my friends and family. But the wonderful thing about these boron isotopes is that they give you this beautiful record of CO2 change in waters. You can equate that to CO2 change in the atmosphere, and so by measuring those shells down through layers of sediment in the deep ocean you can read back through the history of CO2 change in the atmosphere like going in through the pages of a book.Katherine BowersSo how do you get mud from the deep ocean?James RaeThere's a variety of different ways you can do this but essentially all of them involve dropping something that looks a bit like a drain pipe off the side of a ship and pulling it back up. If you want just a little bit of mud you can use really something not far off a drain pipe, but if we want to go deeper in time you use ocean drilling until you drill a core way down kilometers through the sediment to bring up older and older mud.Katherine BowersI have also a question about mud washing. So my mental image of this is when you wash mud it would just like wash away, but sediment is left. So what is mud in that sense, then?James RaeI'm using mud as, you know, my really strict sedimentary geologist colleagues wouldn't be very happy with me, I'm being a bit loose here. I'd say we're washing sediment, and we're washing it through a fine, fine sieve, right? So a sieve where each of the holes in that sieve is about 6% the size of a millimeter, and so this gets rid of really really fine clay. So kind of super microscopic mud, and it leaves behind anything that is sand-sized.And to be a bit geological about this: we're used to seeing sand on beaches. The reason for this is particles that are about as big and as heavy as sand can go down a river where the flow is quite fast, but when it hits the sea, there's no longer the same kind of fast current flow as you have in a river, and so it drops out and that's why we have beaches.So if you find sand-sized material in the middle of the open ocean, it can't have come from on land, because it would have gone down into a beach, and often we're dealing with thousands of kilometers away from land. So we know it must have come from directly above us, and so it must be made by biology. There are a couple of rare instances where you find sand or even gravel in the middle of the ocean. The only way of doing that is occasionally on the very certain, very cold conditions sand gets rafted in by icebergs, but that's a kind of unique case.Katherine BowersThat is actually very helpful for getting a visual of the work that you're doing. It's kind of hard to visualize before but now I feel like I understand it a bit better.James RaeAnd I guess I'd like to add one aspect to that. We wash a lot of mud, but then we do things that probably visually are actually much more exciting. So step one is look under a microscope at these gorgeous microfossil shells, and pick out certain species. Step two, go into a super super super clean lab where we wear white forensic suits so that we don't contaminate our samples, and we do chemical treatments on them, we dissolve up the shells, we purify out the boron which we're interested in measuring. And then step three, we put that through an enormous instrument, it's a bit like a mini version of a particle accelerator. It turns our sample into ions, it fires those down through a vacuum that's a bit like space, makes them bend a corner with a massive magnet and detects these tiny isotopic signals.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?James RaeI've always been interested in Earth's environment, in the outdoors, in nature ever since I was a kid. At school I really liked the bit of exposure I had to the earth sciences through physical geography. I liked being able to go on a walk in the hills in Scotland and understand that the glens there are formed by ancient glaciers from the last ice age, and I wanted to do more of that and to pair my interests in the sciences in particular in chemistry with our understanding of the planet and ideally with a view to understanding climate change, and so that led me to a degree in earth sciences. I absolutely loved it. And as a result I guess I've been at university ever since doing this kind of work.And this project on past climate change in particular just feels like this is something that I have been fascinated by ever since I first found out about it. I am concerned about climate change, I want to do something about it, and as somebody with some chemistry expertise and somebody who understands a bit about Earth's history, beginning to apply chemistry to Earth's history in order to better understand how our planet's climate works, seems like a good meshing together of those skills.Katherine BowersSo what is an unexpected connection that you've made in your work or that you've come across in your work?James RaeSo for this I'm gonna actually talk about a different flavor of looking at Earth's past climate. So moving away from CO2 and thinking again about the ice ages, one of the key processes that's involved in climate and indeed CO2 change during the ice ages are big changes in the ocean's circulation. So we might think of one of the most famous examples of a big current system is the one in the North Atlantic Ocean, we've got the gulf stream which brings tropical water from the Caribbean all the way up to the shores of Scotland, and means that the climate of Scotland today is much milder than the climate of Alaska despite being at a fairly similar latitude. And that's because the Atlantic has this conveyor belt type circulation that brings this warm water north. But today the pacific doesn't have a circulation system like that, and we wanted to investigate, how did the ocean circulation look during the last ice age? And we found, really to our surprise, that during the last ice age the Pacific had one of these conveyor belt type circulations a bit like the modern day Atlantic, and there's a number of cool things about this. I think the really unexpected thing was we realized that, oh my goodness, we can reconstruct the temperature of the north Pacific during the ice age, and it was actually warmer than it was today, despite the fact that the world has plunged into this ice age, because this current system is kicked off you get this warmer-than-present-day temperature.And the neat thing about a really kind of random research connection is that we realized that there was this longstanding debate in the archaeological and anthropological literature about the first settlers in North America, the first human settlers in North America, so how did the Native Americans get to North America. Broadly speaking, people all started out in Africa and moved up through Asia, and you can see that, if you look at the genetics, there is similarity in the genetics of Native American people to Asian people until about 25,000 years ago. But then there's a kind of separation if you look at the genetic coding, and you can see that there was no longer much mixing of the original Asian populations with the founding population of the original North Americans for about, you know, 5,000 to 10,000 years, and yet there's no evidence at that time that they were in America itself. So the question is, where were they, if they're no longer intermixing with their Asian ancestors but they're not yet in North America--because it would have been really hard to get to North America given the huge ice sheets covering the rockies--where were they?And so this has led to this interesting idea of the Beringian Standstill, which is that where the Bering Strait now is between Alaska and Siberia, sea level during the last ice age was actually so low that that was land. And so the idea is that people got up into this bit of land in Beringia and they hung out there for five or eight thousand years. The question has always been, what on Earth would you be doing up there during the last ice age, right? Alaska and Siberia, not habitable climates today, and your assumption would be that these would be even more harsh in the peak of the last ice age, and yet there's always been this interesting evidence that based on pollen data the climate in that region looked surprisingly mild. And the research connection that we made was that actually we think we can explain that mild climate that allowed those early human populations to inhabit Beringia for thousands of years due to the presence of this enhanced circulation system, which meant that rather than Beringia having a climate like a more harsh version of modern day Alaska, it would have looked a bit more like Scotland. And, you know, while some would argue that Scotland is perhaps barely habitable today, it's at least a very different climate system compared to Alaska.Katherine BowersThat's so interesting.James RaeI was just fascinated to stumble across this. I think it shows the value of just trying to keep a bit of a track on the literature. It was spotting a paper that came out on the genetics of ancestral North Americans, and the link to the Beringia Standstill hypothesis. This came out and in Science just at the time that I was thinking about these data from the North Pacific, and I went, wow, I wonder if I've got an explanation for that? And I tried to read up in the literature, but I'm not an archaeologist or an anthropologist by any stretch, so I wasn't that sure about this idea. Would it really hold water? What would that community think of this? And I just happened, at a conference the next summer, to sit next to, at lunch, an anthropologist who studies this exact question. And I was like, oh hey, by the way, I've got an idea about this, what do you think? And he was into it and came on board the paper to help add some expertise on this topic.Katherine BowersSo how does your work help us think about the climate emergency?James RaeI think the key way that our work helps us think about the climate emergency is giving this quite tangible picture of what our planet looks like under elevated CO2 levels. So I've talked about using these boron measurements to find out what time our planet last had a CO2 level as high as 420ppm, and the answer to that is it's about three million years ago, it's a time called the mid-pliocene warm period. And despite the fact that planet Earth looks at first order fairly similar today--the continents are in the same places, it's prior to the evolution of the human genus but it's a world dominated by mammals--but the one key difference is that CO2 is higher, and as a result there is very little ice on Greenland and there's very little ice on west Antarctica, indeed there's a forest of beech trees on the Antarctic peninsula. And as a result of that ice melt, sea level globally is at least ten meters higher than it was today, and ten meters is comfortably enough to flood all of our major coastal cities.And so this shows us I think in quite a tangible way, this doesn't rely on computer modeling, this is just a way that our planet looks when CO2 was this high, the last time in Earth's history. This is our direction of travel. We are not there yet because it takes the climate system time to catch up with elevated CO2 levels, but if we allow CO2 to persist at this elevated level, we risk heading back to the pliocene with that huge loss of ice sheets and that huge rise in sea level. So this really I hope motivates us to make sure that doesn't happen. We do have a window of time to make sure that happened. We have to put less CO2 in the atmosphere. We probably, also, have to actively take CO2 back out of the atmosphere. If we do that quick enough, there is a window to try and avoid that catastrophic melting of mass ice sheets.Katherine BowersWell, reassuring that there is some window at least because in many news reports, it seems like that that window is, I mean I know it's small, but it seems like it's shrinking rapidly.James RaeI mean there's a variety of different windows. I think an important point actually is that there's no one window which when it closes all is lost. Climate change is a steep slope that we tumble down, I don't think it's a cliff edge that we fall off. You know, 1.5° would be great, 1.6 though would be better than 1.7 and 1.7 would be better than 1.8. There is the sliding scale of impacts. Hey if we get to 2.2° there will be a whole bunch of really serious impacts, I mean we are seeing those climate impacts today at 1.2°, 1.3°, we will see more and more of them. But my goodness they will be less extreme and less severe than the climate impacts at 3° of warming. So there's always a window to make things better. The best time to reduce emissions was yesterday, but failing that, today and tomorrow.Katherine BowersWhat can earth science as a discipline contribute to the discourse around climate change today?James RaeEarth science is right at the core of climate change research. The physical science basis of the IPCC reports, this is done by earth scientists. And I think that that's a link that isn't always well understood by the public actually, that the public kind of knows about climate change, might know about the IPCC reports, you know, the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, but has this feel for this is done by climate scientists. But who are climate scientists, where do they sit? If you want to be a climate scientist, what do you study at university? And the answer typically is earth sciences or earth and environmental sciences. And so within our school we have people looking at, how will the monsoon system evolve in the future? Or what's predicted to happen to heat waves and floods? Or if a massive volcano goes off, what will that do to Earth's climate? Or how is CO2 taken up by the ocean and what impacts does that have on marine life? So we're understanding the problem from a whole range of different angles.Earth sciences is also going to be a huge part of the solution, and there's two flavors to that. The first is we need to decarbonize our energy system. That is the most important single thing to do to fix climate change. And that's going to involve digging, no more coal and oil and gas out the ground, but we will need to dig out lithium and niobium and neodemium and cobalt and all of these weird and wonderful metals that we need for green energy technologies. So that raw material requirement to decarbonize the energy system, that's a huge contribution that earth scientists, geologists in particular, will make to fixing climate change.And then the other one is, we are a field where we have the expertise to understand, what does our planet do with elevated CO2? CO2 has gone up in the atmosphere before due to big volcanoes going off, due to the release of methane from methane gas hydrates. It's never done this as quickly as it's happening now, but CO2 has gone up before and then it's come back down again, and it comes back down because it goes into trees and plants, it dissolves into the ocean, and then it reacts with rocks, both rocks on the seafloor and rocks around us on the continents. And so earth scientists are now looking at each of those processes and thinking, are there any of these that we can speed up? This is difficult stuff. There's difficult important ethical questions to ask around this. But they're important ones to think about. In all of the scenarios that the IPCC has that get us to 1.5°C or even 2°C there's a lot of this carbon dioxide removal going on. And earth scientists are the people who are grappling with how we might be able to do that.Katherine BowersThank you so much for speaking with me today. If the people want to find you, where can they find you and your work?James RaeLook me up, I'm on social media under "Mud Water Climates" because those are things that I do, and of course you can Google me, James Rae, I'm working at the University of St Andrews, I'm easy enough to find online.Katherine BowersThinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 2 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. Althea Davies is a paleoecologist and Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her research considers long-term human-environmental interactions, including the effects of prehistoric climate change on land use in the Scottish Highlands.Welcome to the thinking climate change podcast today. Could you please tell us a little about your current research project?Althea DaviesAt the moment, I'm looking into the role of large herbivores in ecosystem dynamics, especially their relationship with woodland survival and regeneration here in the Scottish Highlands. And I know it's a topic that probably prompts a few more questions than it gives answers, so maybe I'll explain a bit more about why that interests me and how it relates to the theme of your podcast.There's been lots of scientific attention, and it's got sort of popular media attention as well, on megafaunal extinction. This is the global extinction of really large animals, often with a weight over a thousand kilograms, across multiple continents, that's happened within largely the last 50,000 years, but some as recent as about 700 years ago, if we go to places like New Zealand where European colonization is much more recent.There's been a lot of interest on what effect does the extinction of these large herbivores have on ecosystem functions--things like nutrient cycling, seed dispersal --because these animals are all considered to be ecosystem engineers. Most of this attention has been given to the megafauna, and rather less to thinking about the surviving herbivores that we still share our landscapes with, and particularly how they influence our landscapes over the really long time scales that it takes for woodlands to form and for climate change to occur. So, for instance, lots of the debate around grazing animals these days tends to focus on very recent experience. So things like, there may be places that there are too many animals, and it's considered damaging, and that's certainly the case in parts of Scotland, where red deer numbers are considered to be too high. But there are also places across the world where there are thought to be too few of these herbivores, and they've been undergoing really worrying declines. For instance, in parts of Eurasia that applies to the saiga antelopes, but also it could be applied to elephants in parts of Africa. So we know a lot more about the distant past and these megaherbivores and very recent concerns, but a lot less about what happens in between.Katherine BowersThat's interesting. And could I just ask you to clarify when you talk about large herbivores, what is an example of one of those?Althea DaviesThe one that I've been focused most on is red deer, so that's the largest surviving living land mammal here in the UK.Katherine BowersWhat kinds of questions are you asking, and how do you go about finding answers for them?Althea DaviesI think one of the reasons why the topic has drawn me in is because, until relatively recently, the methods that we've got have been inadequate for answering questions about whether these much smaller, but still in a modern context large, herbivores, are they also ecosystem engineers? We think they are, but how they interact with changes in woodland cover over thousands of years, we don't really know, especially in, what can we say has happened because of large herbivores, and what can we say has happened because of climate, and how do they interact? We really don't know some of those answers, and some of our methods haven't been too great for working that out.So, for instance, for me, my main discipline is paleoecology, which really just means long term ecology, but looking beyond the things that we can see, we can observe and record in landscapes. So it's using indicators that survive in often what are called natural archives, so in peat deposits or lake mud. I guess people may be more familiar with hearing about the records that we can get about climate in ice cores. And it's similar principles, that you have these microscopic biological or chemical signals that are preserved in a sediment, a soil, or an ice record that that builds up over time. So to understand animals, we have mostly used pollen. So lots of flowering plants produce pollen that's needed to produce seeds, but lots of that pollen drifts through the atmosphere, and some of it settles out on peat bogs or lake sediments, or even ice as well, and we can recover that because it preserves really well. And that has been used to reconstruct changes in vegetation and land cover, but also to understand when there was more disturbance in the ecosystem which we would then think of relating to animals as part of the disturbance regime.But obviously pollen isn't telling us directly about the animals. It's an indirect signal, and it gets a bit, maybe a circular argument, cause we're trying to use pollen to reconstruct the vegetation as well as to detect disturbance, and try and say something about what was causing that disturbance. Obviously, it would be great if we had access to lots of animal bones to tell us how animal populations have changed in the past, but in many parts of the world, especially in the Scottish Highlands, where the soils are acidic, bone doesn't preserve very well. So that gives us small snapshots, but not a really long-term record.So we're now able to use a few different methods. One of those is fungal spores, because, believe it or not, there are fungi that actually need dung to complete their life cycle, so they are dependent on animal dung. And their spores are of similar microscopic size to pollen grains, and they also drift through the environment and land in these natural archives, so we can use them to say there was changes in the amount of dung in the landscape which then tells us something about the animals that were producing the dung. So that comes from paleoecology, and it's also been used to detect the megafaunal extinctions.But then we can also use methods that have been developed in archaeology and archaeological science. So there's a class of chemical compounds called biomarkers, and they come in many different formats. Some of them tell us about climate, but there are also some that tell us about feces. So back to the dung, there are fecal biomarkers that we can use to say something about animals. And the benefit of the biomarkers is that archaeologists have worked to establish that some of the biomarker compounds can actually help us differentiate between the different types of animals that were present in past landscapes, which is something that neither the pollen nor the fungal spores can do. So we've got a really great opportunity to use what we could call multiple proxies, and proxies are indirect measures, to try and reconstruct how animal populations have changed, and then relate that to other forms of evidence that will tell us about climate. So we can start having a better picture of how these things relate to each other on timescales of thousands of years.Katherine BowersIt's amazing to me how you can use parts of the natural world around us today to reconstruct what existed thousands of years ago, or hundreds of years ago, and then how that can tell us things about the present. Would you say that it's possible to use the past in this way to tell us about the future?Althea DaviesYes, but it's a bit trickier. So my work is focused more on the past, especially the recent past. I've worked with historians as well, because there are really great agricultural census data sets that tell us about animal change over a very recent past that we can start to layer up with these longer datasets. I don't use models to predict the future, which you can do using these long term past datasets. I think of it more as thinking, what effect does changes in grazing levels, what effect do they have on biodiversity, for instance? And if we want to restore biodiversity in certain landscapes, like parts of the Scottish Highlands, then we can say something about the levels of grazing that we need to help us achieve those future goals. So I tend to use it more as a heuristic guide to help us achieve what we'd want to do in the future, rather than trying to predict from the past through to the future.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?Althea DaviesI guess there were two things, really. When I moved up to Scotland to do my PhD, it was based in a valley in the North-West Scottish Highlands, and it was a very new environment and unfamiliar to me, and when I first went there I thought it was very bleak and quite depressing. But as I did my PhD research, I really learnt about the subtle beauty of the landscape, and I really wanted to know how people who used to live there, what did they think of their landscape? There's lots of writing, poetry. This is a marginal landscape. But I wanted to know, did the people who lived there in prehistory, in the recent past, did they think of themselves in that way? And we tend to think that animals played a really important part in their life, in their sense of place, their livelihoods, because the soils are not suitable for lots of cultivation, so animals are really their main form of wealth, to help them survive, and as the basis for their livelihoods.So the more I learned about that, and learned about the archeology, sort of drew me into wanting to understand the landscape better, and that led into not just doing paleoecology. I started learning how to do social science and doing interviews with people who are working and living in these landscapes now and managing them. So it's the people who live there and manage these future goals of what they want to preserve and manage for the future. And so I did quite a few years work on woodland restoration, but also particularly some of the tensions around deer management, because deer don't belong to anyone. So they're a common pool resource, if you like. And lots of landscapes across the Scottish Highlands, not all properties have fences to delimit them. So the deer wander between different people's properties, and so different landowners want different things from the deer. Someone might want higher levels because they have interest in shooting deer for sport or protection for the wild venison. And there are people who want fewer deer, particularly where they want woodland regeneration to be more successful. So I worked with deer managers and other researchers to try and work out how we could find common ground.It's that mixture of knowing about the deeper history of the landscape and the people who've made their living there, and some of the complexities of people trying to still live there and work out how to live without coming into conflict with all of their neighbors, that have really drawn me to want to know more about, what is a natural baseline when we think about the Highlands? What would a more natural population of deer look like? So it's really those things that drew me to want to know more and combine paleoecology with archeology, and where I can to try and do some of this work with current land managers.Katherine BowersWhat is an unexpected connection that you have made in your work? I know that there must be some, especially working across disciplines the way you do, because often true interdisciplinarity creates these very vibrant connections that sometimes surprises in many ways. I wonder if you've come across anything like that in your work?Althea DaviesIt's a tough question to answer, because I guess it's more about me learning about the other disciplines and the sorts of stories that they can tell, especially when and why some of the landowners started getting more concerned about boundaries in their landscape rather than shared resources. So I've learnt a huge amount, especially from working with historians, about that. So for me, I guess my unexpected connection is more about doing interdisciplinary research, I think, and the joys and the complexities of learning to work with other people, and the joy of finding people with a similar mindset to you who have that curiosity, where we want to find out things that neither of our disciplines on their own can answer.So one of the findings deepened some of the ideas that I already had around the landscape, but it also filled them out by giving details that I couldn't produce from paleoecology. So, working with historians, I learnt that about the structure of farming communities before the Industrial Revolution and how diverse they were. They were made up not just of one family, but might have been multiple communities, townships they were sometimes called, and their pattern across the landscape involved not giant fields, the sort of big fields that we're used to now, but a patchwork that really meant that they supported quite a lot of biodiversity, because they had a real variety of land uses and areas of different disturbance and nutrient enrichment. And once we get into the Industrial Revolution, lots of these townships were replaced by extensive sheep farms, or in some cases deer forest, so where forest actually means areas for deer rather than necessarily lots of trees. And so by bringing the paleoecology together with the history, we really had this much better understanding of how important it is to think about landscape mosaics if we want to maintain or restore biodiversity, and the importance of grazing as a factor within that.Katherine BowersHow does your work help us think about the climate emergency?Althea DaviesI don't think my work directly addresses it. I think a long term perspective has its limits with dealing with current issues, because obviously the factors that have led to the current situation are often so different, or there was an accumulation of so many things, that the situation that we haven't directly faced in the past. But I think they can help us think very carefully about change, recognize that many of the things that we worry about are invisible because they take place over long timescales. Lots of processes and ecosystems, they don't necessarily respond immediately, they might respond slowly, so we have a lagged response. So it's trying to put that awareness and warning signals in when we think about the climate emergency, and that not every change will be something that we can see immediately.Katherine BowersWhat can paleoecology as a discipline contribute to the discourse around climate change today?Althea DaviesI think maybe there are three things that they can contribute, or at least from my areas of interest.The first of those is to think about a world being transformed. We're so used to familiar landscapes--when I say "us" I think I mean Western society, when we're quite insulated from many of the more extreme aspects of current climate change--I think it's us as the major consumers that need to be much more aware of how much change is going to come our way, and I think the past can help tell us stories about how much change has happened, and think much more about the sort of rippling consequences, the cascades of factors that are coming our way, and use stories in ways that are not purely about entertainment or thinking about crisis, but really thinking carefully about how climate change is going to affect the things that we value.And I think that means the second area where I think paleoecology contributes is that it gives us a reality check, it helps us recognize that we can't turn the clock back and simply put back ecosystems that used to exist. But it can help us give a better understanding of all the things over multiple timescales that have shaped the world as it is now, the things that we value as well, and but also help us think about, when can we resist change? Because sometimes there are things, ecosystems or communities, that we think maybe have a very high cultural value, for instance a national park, or a very high conservation value. And I think, seeing how much change is the normality over long time scales, can maybe help us think more carefully about how much we can resist change, and when we really need to make some tough choices, and accept that we will lose some of the things that we would prefer to preserve. So I think it's a bit of an ecological reality check that we sometimes need to help us be pushed to make decisions about. We have limited finance to restore lots of ecosystems, so we will need to make tough choices.And then the final one, I think, is a bit more positive, and that's thinking about the relationships between people and nature, and learning from examples of when they actually support one another. It's not all about doom and gloom. So thinking about, for instance, going back to one of my favorite ecosystems, woodlands, there are woodlands where we know that people have managed them over very long time scales. So the beeches that might look natural to us now are really the product of long cultural interaction. And so that gives us a signal that if there are values there, and often biodiversity values, we need people to be involved and work with these habitats and invest in active management to maintain biocultural diversity. I think that is a more positive way of seeing the relationships between people and nature.Katherine BowersThank you so much for sharing your work today. It has been a pleasure to speak to you and to learn more about the research that you have been doing. If the audience is interested in learning more about your work, where can they find you?Althea DaviesI don't have a personal web page, so the best places to go are my university page, if you just search for my name at the University of St Andrews, or look on Researchgate, where I put details of the publications and projects as well.Katherine BowersThank you again.Thinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 1 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. James Rae is an earth scientist and Reader at the University Of St Andrews. His research investigates Earth's past climate history using geochemical measurements on archives including sediments, fossils and ice cores.So thank you so much for joining me today. Could you please tell us a little about your current research project?James RaeYeah, for sure. So my research looks at the history of Earth's climate to try and understand better where we're headed in the future. There's a couple of big flavors to this. One is, I look at the ice ages. These are times that are quite recently in Earth's history--that is recently for a geologist, right? A mere thousand years ago, there was a kilometer of ice on top of where I'm currently sat here in St Andrews, and a very different climate, lower CO2, an altered ocean circulation state, changes in biotas. It was the last time that climate was really really different. And so by looking at those altered climate states we can try and better understand how our climate system operates.And then the other flavor of my research, again looking at different climates in the past, but rather than the cold climates of the ice age looking at the warmer climates of the more distant geological past, and there our key aim is to find out an answer to what is I think a really fundamental question which is, CO2 today is at 423 parts per million in the atmosphere. It's the key driver of modern climate change. What did our planet look like the last time that it had 423 ppms in the atmosphere? And so to do that we are making long-term reconstructions of atmospheric CO2 and then we're looking at the climate states associated with those different CO2 levels.Katherine BowersSo what kind of questions are you asking and how do you go about finding answers for them?James RaeSo the big question on CO2 is--we've done this incredible thing to the planet, right? We're running this wild experiment and we are right in the middle of it and it hasn't finished, right? Even if we were to stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere today, our planet is still playing catch up, our climate system is playing catch up, to equilibrate with 420ppm of CO2. Why does it take a bit of time to catch up to that level of CO2? Well one easy way to think about this is, it takes a long time to heat up water, and water in the bottom of the ocean has been there for a thousand years so it doesn't know anything about climate change. It gets upwells, goes, oh my goodness it got warmer up here, and it sucks out a little bit of heat from the atmosphere. So it takes our climate system some time to equilibrate with elevated CO2, and we want to know, what will the results of that experiment look like, by the time the climate equilibrates to higher CO2 levels?So one way of doing that is, you can ask that question to a computer model, dial up CO2, and you can ask this question to the your best representation of Earth's climate system as we can do it in the form of a whole load of equations: what does our planet look like with CO2? And models do an amazing job of a bunch of aspects of our climate system, but as we try and get to these really long timescales, they're both quite difficult to run, and there are uncertainties on the things like the behavior of big ice sheets that are still tricky questions for us to grapple with.So a complimentary way to try and answer this question is to look at Earth's past, so I guess my very specific question is, what time is CO2 420ppm? And how we go about answering that is, we need to find something that was around way back in the geological past that recorded atmospheric CO2 levels. And this is quite a tough nut to crack. For the last million years you've got these beautiful records like the fossil record of the atmosphere which is made up of bubbles in Antarctic ice cores, and that's great, but only for the last million years, and most of the last million years has been colder than present. It was in and out of an ice age. And then beyond a million years we just run out of ice, most of it has melted or flowed away, so we need a different archive to look at.The archive that I'm engaged in, you're interrogating, is the record of deep sea mud from the deep ocean floor, and in particular when you take that mud and you wash it, which sounds like a pretty, I don't know, boring or perhaps kind of esoteric thing to do, mud washing--it's actually something that I employ a bunch of undergraduates to do because it's not the most interesting work, but it's super important--because when you wash that mud and you get out all the really fine clay particles, what you see is something that looks like sand, and when you put it under a microscope you see that that sand is actually made up of millions of tiny shells. And because these shells are growing in sea water, they're plankton, essentially, so they're growing in the surface of the ocean and they're growing from the chemicals available to them in the surface of the ocean, those chemicals in the surface of the ocean are strongly impacted, if you look at the right ones, by the level of CO2 in that water.And we, to be very specific, look at the boron isotope composition of these shells. I'm a card-carrying Boron Moron, both boring and moronic, according to my friends and family. But the wonderful thing about these boron isotopes is that they give you this beautiful record of CO2 change in waters. You can equate that to CO2 change in the atmosphere, and so by measuring those shells down through layers of sediment in the deep ocean you can read back through the history of CO2 change in the atmosphere like going in through the pages of a book.Katherine BowersSo how do you get mud from the deep ocean?James RaeThere's a variety of different ways you can do this but essentially all of them involve dropping something that looks a bit like a drain pipe off the side of a ship and pulling it back up. If you want just a little bit of mud you can use really something not far off a drain pipe, but if we want to go deeper in time you use ocean drilling until you drill a core way down kilometers through the sediment to bring up older and older mud.Katherine BowersI have also a question about mud washing. So my mental image of this is when you wash mud it would just like wash away, but sediment is left. So what is mud in that sense, then?James RaeI'm using mud as, you know, my really strict sedimentary geologist colleagues wouldn't be very happy with me, I'm being a bit loose here. I'd say we're washing sediment, and we're washing it through a fine, fine sieve, right? So a sieve where each of the holes in that sieve is about 6% the size of a millimeter, and so this gets rid of really really fine clay. So kind of super microscopic mud, and it leaves behind anything that is sand-sized.And to be a bit geological about this: we're used to seeing sand on beaches. The reason for this is particles that are about as big and as heavy as sand can go down a river where the flow is quite fast, but when it hits the sea, there's no longer the same kind of fast current flow as you have in a river, and so it drops out and that's why we have beaches.So if you find sand-sized material in the middle of the open ocean, it can't have come from on land, because it would have gone down into a beach, and often we're dealing with thousands of kilometers away from land. So we know it must have come from directly above us, and so it must be made by biology. There are a couple of rare instances where you find sand or even gravel in the middle of the ocean. The only way of doing that is occasionally on the very certain, very cold conditions sand gets rafted in by icebergs, but that's a kind of unique case.Katherine BowersThat is actually very helpful for getting a visual of the work that you're doing. It's kind of hard to visualize before but now I feel like I understand it a bit better.James RaeAnd I guess I'd like to add one aspect to that. We wash a lot of mud, but then we do things that probably visually are actually much more exciting. So step one is look under a microscope at these gorgeous microfossil shells, and pick out certain species. Step two, go into a super super super clean lab where we wear white forensic suits so that we don't contaminate our samples, and we do chemical treatments on them, we dissolve up the shells, we purify out the boron which we're interested in measuring. And then step three, we put that through an enormous instrument, it's a bit like a mini version of a particle accelerator. It turns our sample into ions, it fires those down through a vacuum that's a bit like space, makes them bend a corner with a massive magnet and detects these tiny isotopic signals.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?James RaeI've always been interested in Earth's environment, in the outdoors, in nature ever since I was a kid. At school I really liked the bit of exposure I had to the earth sciences through physical geography. I liked being able to go on a walk in the hills in Scotland and understand that the glens there are formed by ancient glaciers from the last ice age, and I wanted to do more of that and to pair my interests in the sciences in particular in chemistry with our understanding of the planet and ideally with a view to understanding climate change, and so that led me to a degree in earth sciences. I absolutely loved it. And as a result I guess I've been at university ever since doing this kind of work.And this project on past climate change in particular just feels like this is something that I have been fascinated by ever since I first found out about it. I am concerned about climate change, I want to do something about it, and as somebody with some chemistry expertise and somebody who understands a bit about Earth's history, beginning to apply chemistry to Earth's history in order to better understand how our planet's climate works, seems like a good meshing together of those skills.Katherine BowersSo what is an unexpected connection that you've made in your work or that you've come across in your work?James RaeSo for this I'm gonna actually talk about a different flavor of looking at Earth's past climate. So moving away from CO2 and thinking again about the ice ages, one of the key processes that's involved in climate and indeed CO2 change during the ice ages are big changes in the ocean's circulation. So we might think of one of the most famous examples of a big current system is the one in the North Atlantic Ocean, we've got the gulf stream which brings tropical water from the Caribbean all the way up to the shores of Scotland, and means that the climate of Scotland today is much milder than the climate of Alaska despite being at a fairly similar latitude. And that's because the Atlantic has this conveyor belt type circulation that brings this warm water north. But today the pacific doesn't have a circulation system like that, and we wanted to investigate, how did the ocean circulation look during the last ice age? And we found, really to our surprise, that during the last ice age the Pacific had one of these conveyor belt type circulations a bit like the modern day Atlantic, and there's a number of cool things about this. I think the really unexpected thing was we realized that, oh my goodness, we can reconstruct the temperature of the north Pacific during the ice age, and it was actually warmer than it was today, despite the fact that the world has plunged into this ice age, because this current system is kicked off you get this warmer-than-present-day temperature.And the neat thing about a really kind of random research connection is that we realized that there was this longstanding debate in the archaeological and anthropological literature about the first settlers in North America, the first human settlers in North America, so how did the Native Americans get to North America. Broadly speaking, people all started out in Africa and moved up through Asia, and you can see that, if you look at the genetics, there is similarity in the genetics of Native American people to Asian people until about 25,000 years ago. But then there's a kind of separation if you look at the genetic coding, and you can see that there was no longer much mixing of the original Asian populations with the founding population of the original North Americans for about, you know, 5,000 to 10,000 years, and yet there's no evidence at that time that they were in America itself. So the question is, where were they, if they're no longer intermixing with their Asian ancestors but they're not yet in North America--because it would have been really hard to get to North America given the huge ice sheets covering the rockies--where were they?And so this has led to this interesting idea of the Beringian Standstill, which is that where the Bering Strait now is between Alaska and Siberia, sea level during the last ice age was actually so low that that was land. And so the idea is that people got up into this bit of land in Beringia and they hung out there for five or eight thousand years. The question has always been, what on Earth would you be doing up there during the last ice age, right? Alaska and Siberia, not habitable climates today, and your assumption would be that these would be even more harsh in the peak of the last ice age, and yet there's always been this interesting evidence that based on pollen data the climate in that region looked surprisingly mild. And the research connection that we made was that actually we think we can explain that mild climate that allowed those early human populations to inhabit Beringia for thousands of years due to the presence of this enhanced circulation system, which meant that rather than Beringia having a climate like a more harsh version of modern day Alaska, it would have looked a bit more like Scotland. And, you know, while some would argue that Scotland is perhaps barely habitable today, it's at least a very different climate system compared to Alaska.Katherine BowersThat's so interesting.James RaeI was just fascinated to stumble across this. I think it shows the value of just trying to keep a bit of a track on the literature. It was spotting a paper that came out on the genetics of ancestral North Americans, and the link to the Beringia Standstill hypothesis. This came out and in Science just at the time that I was thinking about these data from the North Pacific, and I went, wow, I wonder if I've got an explanation for that? And I tried to read up in the literature, but I'm not an archaeologist or an anthropologist by any stretch, so I wasn't that sure about this idea. Would it really hold water? What would that community think of this? And I just happened, at a conference the next summer, to sit next to, at lunch, an anthropologist who studies this exact question. And I was like, oh hey, by the way, I've got an idea about this, what do you think? And he was into it and came on board the paper to help add some expertise on this topic.Katherine BowersSo how does your work help us think about the climate emergency?James RaeI think the key way that our work helps us think about the climate emergency is giving this quite tangible picture of what our planet looks like under elevated CO2 levels. So I've talked about using these boron measurements to find out what time our planet last had a CO2 level as high as 420ppm, and the answer to that is it's about three million years ago, it's a time called the mid-pliocene warm period. And despite the fact that planet Earth looks at first order fairly similar today--the continents are in the same places, it's prior to the evolution of the human genus but it's a world dominated by mammals--but the one key difference is that CO2 is higher, and as a result there is very little ice on Greenland and there's very little ice on west Antarctica, indeed there's a forest of beech trees on the Antarctic peninsula. And as a result of that ice melt, sea level globally is at least ten meters higher than it was today, and ten meters is comfortably enough to flood all of our major coastal cities.And so this shows us I think in quite a tangible way, this doesn't rely on computer modeling, this is just a way that our planet looks when CO2 was this high, the last time in Earth's history. This is our direction of travel. We are not there yet because it takes the climate system time to catch up with elevated CO2 levels, but if we allow CO2 to persist at this elevated level, we risk heading back to the pliocene with that huge loss of ice sheets and that huge rise in sea level. So this really I hope motivates us to make sure that doesn't happen. We do have a window of time to make sure that happened. We have to put less CO2 in the atmosphere. We probably, also, have to actively take CO2 back out of the atmosphere. If we do that quick enough, there is a window to try and avoid that catastrophic melting of mass ice sheets.Katherine BowersWell, reassuring that there is some window at least because in many news reports, it seems like that that window is, I mean I know it's small, but it seems like it's shrinking rapidly.James RaeI mean there's a variety of different windows. I think an important point actually is that there's no one window which when it closes all is lost. Climate change is a steep slope that we tumble down, I don't think it's a cliff edge that we fall off. You know, 1.5° would be great, 1.6 though would be better than 1.7 and 1.7 would be better than 1.8. There is the sliding scale of impacts. Hey if we get to 2.2° there will be a whole bunch of really serious impacts, I mean we are seeing those climate impacts today at 1.2°, 1.3°, we will see more and more of them. But my goodness they will be less extreme and less severe than the climate impacts at 3° of warming. So there's always a window to make things better. The best time to reduce emissions was yesterday, but failing that, today and tomorrow.Katherine BowersWhat can earth science as a discipline contribute to the discourse around climate change today?James RaeEarth science is right at the core of climate change research. The physical science basis of the IPCC reports, this is done by earth scientists. And I think that that's a link that isn't always well understood by the public actually, that the public kind of knows about climate change, might know about the IPCC reports, you know, the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, but has this feel for this is done by climate scientists. But who are climate scientists, where do they sit? If you want to be a climate scientist, what do you study at university? And the answer typically is earth sciences or earth and environmental sciences. And so within our school we have people looking at, how will the monsoon system evolve in the future? Or what's predicted to happen to heat waves and floods? Or if a massive volcano goes off, what will that do to Earth's climate? Or how is CO2 taken up by the ocean and what impacts does that have on marine life? So we're understanding the problem from a whole range of different angles.Earth sciences is also going to be a huge part of the solution, and there's two flavors to that. The first is we need to decarbonize our energy system. That is the most important single thing to do to fix climate change. And that's going to involve digging, no more coal and oil and gas out the ground, but we will need to dig out lithium and niobium and neodemium and cobalt and all of these weird and wonderful metals that we need for green energy technologies. So that raw material requirement to decarbonize the energy system, that's a huge contribution that earth scientists, geologists in particular, will make to fixing climate change.And then the other one is, we are a field where we have the expertise to understand, what does our planet do with elevated CO2? CO2 has gone up in the atmosphere before due to big volcanoes going off, due to the release of methane from methane gas hydrates. It's never done this as quickly as it's happening now, but CO2 has gone up before and then it's come back down again, and it comes back down because it goes into trees and plants, it dissolves into the ocean, and then it reacts with rocks, both rocks on the seafloor and rocks around us on the continents. And so earth scientists are now looking at each of those processes and thinking, are there any of these that we can speed up? This is difficult stuff. There's difficult important ethical questions to ask around this. But they're important ones to think about. In all of the scenarios that the IPCC has that get us to 1.5°C or even 2°C there's a lot of this carbon dioxide removal going on. And earth scientists are the people who are grappling with how we might be able to do that.Katherine BowersThank you so much for speaking with me today. If the people want to find you, where can they find you and your work?James RaeLook me up, I'm on social media under "Mud Water Climates" because those are things that I do, and of course you can Google me, James Rae, I'm working at the University of St Andrews, I'm easy enough to find online.Katherine BowersThinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 2 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. Althea Davies is a paleoecologist and Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her research considers long-term human-environmental interactions, including the effects of prehistoric climate change on land use in the Scottish Highlands.Welcome to the thinking climate change podcast today. Could you please tell us a little about your current research project?Althea DaviesAt the moment, I'm looking into the role of large herbivores in ecosystem dynamics, especially their relationship with woodland survival and regeneration here in the Scottish Highlands. And I know it's a topic that probably prompts a few more questions than it gives answers, so maybe I'll explain a bit more about why that interests me and how it relates to the theme of your podcast.There's been lots of scientific attention, and it's got sort of popular media attention as well, on megafaunal extinction. This is the global extinction of really large animals, often with a weight over a thousand kilograms, across multiple continents, that's happened within largely the last 50,000 years, but some as recent as about 700 years ago, if we go to places like New Zealand where European colonization is much more recent.There's been a lot of interest on what effect does the extinction of these large herbivores have on ecosystem functions--things like nutrient cycling, seed dispersal --because these animals are all considered to be ecosystem engineers. Most of this attention has been given to the megafauna, and rather less to thinking about the surviving herbivores that we still share our landscapes with, and particularly how they influence our landscapes over the really long time scales that it takes for woodlands to form and for climate change to occur. So, for instance, lots of the debate around grazing animals these days tends to focus on very recent experience. So things like, there may be places that there are too many animals, and it's considered damaging, and that's certainly the case in parts of Scotland, where red deer numbers are considered to be too high. But there are also places across the world where there are thought to be too few of these herbivores, and they've been undergoing really worrying declines. For instance, in parts of Eurasia that applies to the saiga antelopes, but also it could be applied to elephants in parts of Africa. So we know a lot more about the distant past and these megaherbivores and very recent concerns, but a lot less about what happens in between.Katherine BowersThat's interesting. And could I just ask you to clarify when you talk about large herbivores, what is an example of one of those?Althea DaviesThe one that I've been focused most on is red deer, so that's the largest surviving living land mammal here in the UK.Katherine BowersWhat kinds of questions are you asking, and how do you go about finding answers for them?Althea DaviesI think one of the reasons why the topic has drawn me in is because, until relatively recently, the methods that we've got have been inadequate for answering questions about whether these much smaller, but still in a modern context large, herbivores, are they also ecosystem engineers? We think they are, but how they interact with changes in woodland cover over thousands of years, we don't really know, especially in, what can we say has happened because of large herbivores, and what can we say has happened because of climate, and how do they interact? We really don't know some of those answers, and some of our methods haven't been too great for working that out.So, for instance, for me, my main discipline is paleoecology, which really just means long term ecology, but looking beyond the things that we can see, we can observe and record in landscapes. So it's using indicators that survive in often what are called natural archives, so in peat deposits or lake mud. I guess people may be more familiar with hearing about the records that we can get about climate in ice cores. And it's similar principles, that you have these microscopic biological or chemical signals that are preserved in a sediment, a soil, or an ice record that that builds up over time. So to understand animals, we have mostly used pollen. So lots of flowering plants produce pollen that's needed to produce seeds, but lots of that pollen drifts through the atmosphere, and some of it settles out on peat bogs or lake sediments, or even ice as well, and we can recover that because it preserves really well. And that has been used to reconstruct changes in vegetation and land cover, but also to understand when there was more disturbance in the ecosystem which we would then think of relating to animals as part of the disturbance regime.But obviously pollen isn't telling us directly about the animals. It's an indirect signal, and it gets a bit, maybe a circular argument, cause we're trying to use pollen to reconstruct the vegetation as well as to detect disturbance, and try and say something about what was causing that disturbance. Obviously, it would be great if we had access to lots of animal bones to tell us how animal populations have changed in the past, but in many parts of the world, especially in the Scottish Highlands, where the soils are acidic, bone doesn't preserve very well. So that gives us small snapshots, but not a really long-term record.So we're now able to use a few different methods. One of those is fungal spores, because, believe it or not, there are fungi that actually need dung to complete their life cycle, so they are dependent on animal dung. And their spores are of similar microscopic size to pollen grains, and they also drift through the environment and land in these natural archives, so we can use them to say there was changes in the amount of dung in the landscape which then tells us something about the animals that were producing the dung. So that comes from paleoecology, and it's also been used to detect the megafaunal extinctions.But then we can also use methods that have been developed in archaeology and archaeological science. So there's a class of chemical compounds called biomarkers, and they come in many different formats. Some of them tell us about climate, but there are also some that tell us about feces. So back to the dung, there are fecal biomarkers that we can use to say something about animals. And the benefit of the biomarkers is that archaeologists have worked to establish that some of the biomarker compounds can actually help us differentiate between the different types of animals that were present in past landscapes, which is something that neither the pollen nor the fungal spores can do. So we've got a really great opportunity to use what we could call multiple proxies, and proxies are indirect measures, to try and reconstruct how animal populations have changed, and then relate that to other forms of evidence that will tell us about climate. So we can start having a better picture of how these things relate to each other on timescales of thousands of years.Katherine BowersIt's amazing to me how you can use parts of the natural world around us today to reconstruct what existed thousands of years ago, or hundreds of years ago, and then how that can tell us things about the present. Would you say that it's possible to use the past in this way to tell us about the future?Althea DaviesYes, but it's a bit trickier. So my work is focused more on the past, especially the recent past. I've worked with historians as well, because there are really great agricultural census data sets that tell us about animal change over a very recent past that we can start to layer up with these longer datasets. I don't use models to predict the future, which you can do using these long term past datasets. I think of it more as thinking, what effect does changes in grazing levels, what effect do they have on biodiversity, for instance? And if we want to restore biodiversity in certain landscapes, like parts of the Scottish Highlands, then we can say something about the levels of grazing that we need to help us achieve those future goals. So I tend to use it more as a heuristic guide to help us achieve what we'd want to do in the future, rather than trying to predict from the past through to the future.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?Althea DaviesI guess there were two things, really. When I moved up to Scotland to do my PhD, it was based in a valley in the North-West Scottish Highlands, and it was a very new environment and unfamiliar to me, and when I first went there I thought it was very bleak and quite depressing. But as I did my PhD research, I really learnt about the subtle beauty of the landscape, and I really wanted to know how people who used to live there, what did they think of their landscape? There's lots of writing, poetry. This is a marginal landscape. But I wanted to know, did the people who lived there in prehistory, in the recent past, did they think of themselves in that way? And we tend to think that animals played a really important part in their life, in their sense of place, their livelihoods, because the soils are not suitable for lots of cultivation, so animals are really their main form of wealth, to help them survive, and as the basis for their livelihoods.So the more I learned about that, and learned about the archeology, sort of drew me into wanting to understand the landscape better, and that led into not just doing paleoecology. I started learning how to do social science and doing interviews with people who are working and living in these landscapes now and managing them. So it's the people who live there and manage these future goals of what they want to preserve and manage for the future. And so I did quite a few years work on woodland restoration, but also particularly some of the tensions around deer management, because deer don't belong to anyone. So they're a common pool resource, if you like. And lots of landscapes across the Scottish Highlands, not all properties have fences to delimit them. So the deer wander between different people's properties, and so different landowners want different things from the deer. Someone might want higher levels because they have interest in shooting deer for sport or protection for the wild venison. And there are people who want fewer deer, particularly where they want woodland regeneration to be more successful. So I worked with deer managers and other researchers to try and work out how we could find common ground.It's that mixture of knowing about the deeper history of the landscape and the people who've made their living there, and some of the complexities of people trying to still live there and work out how to live without coming into conflict with all of their neighbors, that have really drawn me to want to know more about, what is a natural baseline when we think about the Highlands? What would a more natural population of deer look like? So it's really those things that drew me to want to know more and combine paleoecology with archeology, and where I can to try and do some of this work with current land managers.Katherine BowersWhat is an unexpected connection that you have made in your work? I know that there must be some, especially working across disciplines the way you do, because often true interdisciplinarity creates these very vibrant connections that sometimes surprises in many ways. I wonder if you've come across anything like that in your work?Althea DaviesIt's a tough question to answer, because I guess it's more about me learning about the other disciplines and the sorts of stories that they can tell, especially when and why some of the landowners started getting more concerned about boundaries in their landscape rather than shared resources. So I've learnt a huge amount, especially from working with historians, about that. So for me, I guess my unexpected connection is more about doing interdisciplinary research, I think, and the joys and the complexities of learning to work with other people, and the joy of finding people with a similar mindset to you who have that curiosity, where we want to find out things that neither of our disciplines on their own can answer.So one of the findings deepened some of the ideas that I already had around the landscape, but it also filled them out by giving details that I couldn't produce from paleoecology. So, working with historians, I learnt that about the structure of farming communities before the Industrial Revolution and how diverse they were. They were made up not just of one family, but might have been multiple communities, townships they were sometimes called, and their pattern across the landscape involved not giant fields, the sort of big fields that we're used to now, but a patchwork that really meant that they supported quite a lot of biodiversity, because they had a real variety of land uses and areas of different disturbance and nutrient enrichment. And once we get into the Industrial Revolution, lots of these townships were replaced by extensive sheep farms, or in some cases deer forest, so where forest actually means areas for deer rather than necessarily lots of trees. And so by bringing the paleoecology together with the history, we really had this much better understanding of how important it is to think about landscape mosaics if we want to maintain or restore biodiversity, and the importance of grazing as a factor within that.Katherine BowersHow does your work help us think about the climate emergency?Althea DaviesI don't think my work directly addresses it. I think a long term perspective has its limits with dealing with current issues, because obviously the factors that have led to the current situation are often so different, or there was an accumulation of so many things, that the situation that we haven't directly faced in the past. But I think they can help us think very carefully about change, recognize that many of the things that we worry about are invisible because they take place over long timescales. Lots of processes and ecosystems, they don't necessarily respond immediately, they might respond slowly, so we have a lagged response. So it's trying to put that awareness and warning signals in when we think about the climate emergency, and that not every change will be something that we can see immediately.Katherine BowersWhat can paleoecology as a discipline contribute to the discourse around climate change today?Althea DaviesI think maybe there are three things that they can contribute, or at least from my areas of interest.The first of those is to think about a world being transformed. We're so used to familiar landscapes--when I say "us" I think I mean Western society, when we're quite insulated from many of the more extreme aspects of current climate change--I think it's us as the major consumers that need to be much more aware of how much change is going to come our way, and I think the past can help tell us stories about how much change has happened, and think much more about the sort of rippling consequences, the cascades of factors that are coming our way, and use stories in ways that are not purely about entertainment or thinking about crisis, but really thinking carefully about how climate change is going to affect the things that we value.And I think that means the second area where I think paleoecology contributes is that it gives us a reality check, it helps us recognize that we can't turn the clock back and simply put back ecosystems that used to exist. But it can help us give a better understanding of all the things over multiple timescales that have shaped the world as it is now, the things that we value as well, and but also help us think about, when can we resist change? Because sometimes there are things, ecosystems or communities, that we think maybe have a very high cultural value, for instance a national park, or a very high conservation value. And I think, seeing how much change is the normality over long time scales, can maybe help us think more carefully about how much we can resist change, and when we really need to make some tough choices, and accept that we will lose some of the things that we would prefer to preserve. So I think it's a bit of an ecological reality check that we sometimes need to help us be pushed to make decisions about. We have limited finance to restore lots of ecosystems, so we will need to make tough choices.And then the final one, I think, is a bit more positive, and that's thinking about the relationships between people and nature, and learning from examples of when they actually support one another. It's not all about doom and gloom. So thinking about, for instance, going back to one of my favorite ecosystems, woodlands, there are woodlands where we know that people have managed them over very long time scales. So the beeches that might look natural to us now are really the product of long cultural interaction. And so that gives us a signal that if there are values there, and often biodiversity values, we need people to be involved and work with these habitats and invest in active management to maintain biocultural diversity. I think that is a more positive way of seeing the relationships between people and nature.Katherine BowersThank you so much for sharing your work today. It has been a pleasure to speak to you and to learn more about the research that you have been doing. If the audience is interested in learning more about your work, where can they find you?Althea DaviesI don't have a personal web page, so the best places to go are my university page, if you just search for my name at the University of St Andrews, or look on Researchgate, where I put details of the publications and projects as well.Katherine BowersThank you again.Thinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 3 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. Stephanie O'Rourke is an art historian and Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her current research project examines the way the European visual artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depicted landscapes and, through them, the changing attitudes about the natural world.Welcome to the podcast. To begin could you please tell us a little about your current research project.Stephanie O'RourkeWell first of all, thanks so much for having me be part of this conversation with you.So I'm an art historian. I'm mainly thinking about visual material of the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth century in Western Europe and some of its colonial networks. I've recently been working on a book about the relationship between landscape and extraction, resource extracting industries such as timber harvesting, which was really important in that moment, as well as ore mining, coal mining, things like that. One of the larger aims here is to think about how a kind of depletion-based way of relating to the natural world was visualized in this period, because this is really the emergence of industrial modernity in Europe. I mean it's a bit earlier than the existing histories we have, so for instance, I'm wondering about how certain ways of picturing the natural environment enable an extractive way of understanding it, but also trying to query whether there were forms of picturing the natural environment that introduced friction into the protocols of extraction, in the moment that extraction is being consolidated and becoming increasingly important to how Western European economies are being run.Katherine BowersSo you've already talked a little bit about this in your first answer, but I'm wondering, what are some of the questions that you're asking, some of perhaps the bigger questions that your project asks, and how do you go about finding answers for them?Stephanie O'RourkeThat's a very good question. Maybe not as straightforward to answer as I might wish. I would say on a concrete level one of the questions that my project tries to raise is to look anew at what is being pictured in landscape paintings, but not just landscape paintings. There are things that we now understand as part of industrial extraction, for instance around timber management, but also illicit activities that worked around the margins of timber management and that were legislated against to protect the timber industry, such as gathering for sticks and things like that, these illegal uses of the woods. We've got these seemingly very bucolic paintings of peasants in woods and now we can look at them and understand this is a contested space. These peasants were engaging in activities that were being outlawed through national efforts to protect the interests of the timber industry. So that would be an example of what is being represented and thinking anew about that. Or in another portion of this project I look at mining, some of these mountains that were being portrayed were understood as sites of mining. In fact, mining powered entire regional economies in for instance parts of southern and eastern Germany. So we talk about these mining landscapes as if they're about the sublime, and I'm suggesting that they're instead about what's beneath the surface of the mountain, they're actually about mining as a new way of relating to that environment.So with what is being shown, those are two examples. And I think another question that I try to raise in this project is how is something being shown? For this I'm interested in looking at visual material that exceeds what we traditionally define as a landscape. That's one of the hows of how I'm uncovering this. With my work on German mountain communities I'm also looking at the diagrams that are printed in these early mineralogical texts, and so for instance, what I'm asking is, how is this natural environment being shown in a way that enables people to think of it in extractive terms? I would be looking at the way that it flattens this really complex terrain into something both flat and seemingly very simple, when you impose a scale or numerical grid onto something this implies a landscape, a terrain that can be kind of rationalized, optimized, managed. These are some of the protocols of extractive capitalism that will be brought to bear on those physical environments.And likewise there are related questions about whether sight itself, whether vision can be extractive, specifically in the sense of recognizing looking at a physical environment and visualizing something in a way that imagines how easy it would be to sort of pluck it out and set it into circulation as a commodity. So I think there are ways of picturing that encourage the viewer to see a specific feature as extractable, and likewise there are ways of picturing that require the viewer to take a long time, and it's difficult to sort of disaggregate different features of the natural world in a landscape, and so I'm querying, is that a way of picturing, a way of viewing, that thwarts the market imperatives of extraction?Katherine BowersDo you find that some of the artists that you're looking at when they're painting these, or when they're depicting things like for example the peasants that are engaged in illegal activities on land, is the depiction of those politicized, or is this simply artists working towards a specific kind of aesthetic of the peasant on the land without that political lens?Stephanie O'RourkeThat's a good question. I think it's very difficult to say because there are also larger questions about who pictures are for. So for instance, would an aristocratic patron find it non-threatening and delightful even to see this traditional practice being commemorated even at the very moment that they know it's coming under threat? There were some artists that we know were appealing for the preservation of for instance historical woodlands long before the environmentalism movement, and so that's a particularly rich example where you can say, this is the way they're picturing the woodlands and here are the letters that they wrote to Napoleon III asking for those woodlands to be protected. And so we feel comfortable saying there is this sort of proto-ecological activism that is the politics of this image. But interestingly, with the German Romantics in particular, quite a few of them were mining administrators or were somehow engaged in the mining economy. So Goethe was employed as a mining administrator, Novalis. So even though we understand these thinkers to be embracing a kind of natural philosophy which sees complete oneness between the self and the natural world, they were also descending into mines and drafting up charts for how to optimize the extraction of these metal ores, and they're overseeing mining structures, so it's not always obvious from first glance, what the politics of one of these artworks is going to be.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?Stephanie O'RourkeI think like you I'm wondering about what kinds of historical methods and also historical insights can be mobilized in the present day, and at least in the case of art history, we've talked a long time about industrialization. There's no surprise that that's one of the major shifts that's happening in nineteenth century Europe, but it's difficult to be more precise about what the mechanisms of that were. And I think especially industrialization, it tends to draw your focus to what humans are doing in relation to things like built infrastructure, what they're doing in relation to technologies. It's certainly a really important place to think about what's happening with class and labor. But today obviously one of the pressing concerns we have is, whether it's going to be possible to shift the way that humans relate to the natural world, and so I wanted to frame a historical question that focused on how such a relationship came to be installed in European visual culture in the first place. Maybe to kind of excavate what the early history of that was, so that's why I tried to focus instead on extraction, not just extraction but kind of a use-based way of relating to the natural world.Katherine BowersSo what is an unexpected connection that you have made in your work? Do you find that the things that you've found as you've researched more into this are what you expected to find, or do you find that there are some connections or some resonances that you perhaps would not have anticipated when you started this project?Stephanie O'RourkeOne of the broader trends in environmental history, literature, and in art history is ecocriticism, which often entails recovering an ecological vantage point in a historical artwork. So something that prioritizes the interconnectedness and interdependency and biodiversity of a given environment. We assume that artworks that enshrine those characteristics therefore also have a kind of ideological opposition to subordinating the natural world to economic imperatives, and that's not what I was trying to do. I was trying to inhabit a more historical vantage point. But the problem is that obviously I'm doing so from the present day which is animated by these extremely specific concerns.There was something that came up when I was researching timber management in France and in colonial Algeria that really struck me, both in the way that it differed from the present day and then in this unexpected way that it anticipated the present day. So I was looking at these mid-nineteenth century French landscapes of forests, and the main ways that we have to understand these are firstly that they're part of a broader trend of naturalism, getting closer to nature, depicting nature with greater particularity, more emphasis on transient atmospheric conditions, the sense of, this is what this specific place looked like at this moment under these conditions, and the idea that you could have some sort of intimacy to that landscape. Also in a related way, at least one of the artists was involved in advocating for the preservation of some historic woodlands, so we do know that he did have these concerns.But when I was researching it I found that not just this one artist but quite a few artists at the time were not just painting these woodlands but they were painting a lot of flood scenes, and that's because in the first half of the nineteenth century France came to understand itself as a country that was really plagued by damaging flooding, and they specifically believed that the flooding was the result of deforestation. So this is a country that, there was quite devastating flooding in the 1820s, 30s and 40s, so when I was looking at a flood scene from the 1850s I came to understand that even 150 years ago the French were saying a certain extraction industry has been operating without constraints and it has destabilized our climate in ways that are threatening our agriculture, our way of life, etc. And I hadn't expected to find that, and what I encountered when I looked into it was actually that people wrote extensively about the notion that the climate of territorial France was extremely dependent on what was happening in colonial Algeria at the time. There was a lot of debate about the Sahara Desert potentially expanding if they were allowed to cut down trees in the wrong places and then the desert sands were going to blow through Algeria and threaten France's colonial possession of it. On the other hand it was extensively theorized by some scientists that the warm air over the Sahara blew northward and hovered over France, and so the idea was that France had this temperate climate for how far north it was because of the forest management that they were undertaking in colonial Algeria. So there is this colonial climate project going on. What also surprised me about it was that a there was a very refined understanding in this moment of landscapes being connected across vast distances. When I'm looking at a French painting of an Algerian forest, I understand that the viewers in the Paris salon, they understand the climatological space of Paris and of the scene of this French Algerian forest as being interconnected. And that really surprised me.Katherine BowersAnd that's a level of interconnectivity that's not apparent at first viewing, right? You might see the colonial aspect of that of that painting but not necessarily the fact that those Parisian viewers would feel the reality of the warmth of the painting as part of their climateological experience.Stephanie O'RourkeI think that's exactly right. I think that's really beautifully put.Katherine BowersSo how does your work help us think about the climate emergency that we are experiencing today?Stephanie O'RourkeIn my research I tried to be realistic and practical. I haven't found it especially useful or especially possible to follow the calls of certain ecocritical activists about, you know, embracing radical solidarity with our gut biome. Even though that sounds great. I think what I'm trying to to focus on in the research is a very workmanlike understanding of the fact that images, like narratives, are tools that we use to manage our relationship to our environment, how we understand that relationship. And I do think it's possible to better appreciate how certain ways of literally perceiving it encourage us or enable us to see ourselves as completely separate from it, and able to sort of get things out of it willy-nilly. I also think it's useful to look at historical images that don't enable that and to query, you know, what would it look like in the present day to picture the natural world in a way that doesn't enable us to have this sort of extractive fantasy about it. Ultimately though I don't think I've recovered amazing strategies of resistance in the nineteenth century archive, but I do think it's possible to take more seriously the idea that images can enable or can disable extractive ways of understanding the natural world and they have done that in the past and I think they do do that now.Katherine BowersSo what can art history as a discipline contribute to the discourse around climate change today?Stephanie O'RourkeI think that this is a question many humanistic disciplines are asking themselves, especially with renewed urgency as things like funding structures are changing, and art history, one of the many things it has going for it is that there is a sensory immediacy to an encounter with an artwork that can cut through a lot of cultural noise and that can also cut through some of the cultural hierarchies by which people feel estranged from certain experiences and certain cultural products. So I think that there's a lot of scope for contemporary artists to intervene with how we relate to our environment, how we understand our place in the history of it, and I think art history can also do a lot to excavate the aesthetic and maybe some of the affective dimensionalities of how we've come to internalize an extractive way of relating to the natural world, and at the very least a better understanding of that is going to make it seem less naturalized, less sort of inevitable, maybe a bit less hegemonic. And I think beyond that the question is very much up for debate. But I see an enormous kind of creativity that's emerging in art history as people are challenging themselves with that question.Katherine BowersWell thank you for speaking with me today. This has been a really interesting conversation about the possibilities that art history and that your work in particular looking at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape depiction holds for thinking through climate change. I'm wondering, if our listeners are interested in finding your work, where can they find it?Stephanie O'RourkeWell they could they could Google my name. And I have an academic web page and I've also got a personal website that has versions of my scholarship that aren't behind paywalls. And on that website they'll also find a link to a podcast that I did about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geology, which I think is not thinking about climate in the way that your project is but might have some interesting other stories along the way that people could check out.Katherine BowersEnlightenment Rocks? Stephanie O'RourkeThat's right, Enlightenment Rocks!Katherine BowersFantastic.Stephanie O'RourkeGreat. Well thank you so much for and having me on to talk about this and I really look forward to seeing what you do with the rest of the project.Katherine BowersIt's been a pleasure.Thinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 1 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. James Rae is an earth scientist and Reader at the University Of St Andrews. His research investigates Earth's past climate history using geochemical measurements on archives including sediments, fossils and ice cores.So thank you so much for joining me today. Could you please tell us a little about your current research project?James RaeYeah, for sure. So my research looks at the history of Earth's climate to try and understand better where we're headed in the future. There's a couple of big flavors to this. One is, I look at the ice ages. These are times that are quite recently in Earth's history--that is recently for a geologist, right? A mere thousand years ago, there was a kilometer of ice on top of where I'm currently sat here in St Andrews, and a very different climate, lower CO2, an altered ocean circulation state, changes in biotas. It was the last time that climate was really really different. And so by looking at those altered climate states we can try and better understand how our climate system operates.And then the other flavor of my research, again looking at different climates in the past, but rather than the cold climates of the ice age looking at the warmer climates of the more distant geological past, and there our key aim is to find out an answer to what is I think a really fundamental question which is, CO2 today is at 423 parts per million in the atmosphere. It's the key driver of modern climate change. What did our planet look like the last time that it had 423 ppms in the atmosphere? And so to do that we are making long-term reconstructions of atmospheric CO2 and then we're looking at the climate states associated with those different CO2 levels.Katherine BowersSo what kind of questions are you asking and how do you go about finding answers for them?James RaeSo the big question on CO2 is--we've done this incredible thing to the planet, right? We're running this wild experiment and we are right in the middle of it and it hasn't finished, right? Even if we were to stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere today, our planet is still playing catch up, our climate system is playing catch up, to equilibrate with 420ppm of CO2. Why does it take a bit of time to catch up to that level of CO2? Well one easy way to think about this is, it takes a long time to heat up water, and water in the bottom of the ocean has been there for a thousand years so it doesn't know anything about climate change. It gets upwells, goes, oh my goodness it got warmer up here, and it sucks out a little bit of heat from the atmosphere. So it takes our climate system some time to equilibrate with elevated CO2, and we want to know, what will the results of that experiment look like, by the time the climate equilibrates to higher CO2 levels?So one way of doing that is, you can ask that question to a computer model, dial up CO2, and you can ask this question to the your best representation of Earth's climate system as we can do it in the form of a whole load of equations: what does our planet look like with CO2? And models do an amazing job of a bunch of aspects of our climate system, but as we try and get to these really long timescales, they're both quite difficult to run, and there are uncertainties on the things like the behavior of big ice sheets that are still tricky questions for us to grapple with.So a complimentary way to try and answer this question is to look at Earth's past, so I guess my very specific question is, what time is CO2 420ppm? And how we go about answering that is, we need to find something that was around way back in the geological past that recorded atmospheric CO2 levels. And this is quite a tough nut to crack. For the last million years you've got these beautiful records like the fossil record of the atmosphere which is made up of bubbles in Antarctic ice cores, and that's great, but only for the last million years, and most of the last million years has been colder than present. It was in and out of an ice age. And then beyond a million years we just run out of ice, most of it has melted or flowed away, so we need a different archive to look at.The archive that I'm engaged in, you're interrogating, is the record of deep sea mud from the deep ocean floor, and in particular when you take that mud and you wash it, which sounds like a pretty, I don't know, boring or perhaps kind of esoteric thing to do, mud washing--it's actually something that I employ a bunch of undergraduates to do because it's not the most interesting work, but it's super important--because when you wash that mud and you get out all the really fine clay particles, what you see is something that looks like sand, and when you put it under a microscope you see that that sand is actually made up of millions of tiny shells. And because these shells are growing in sea water, they're plankton, essentially, so they're growing in the surface of the ocean and they're growing from the chemicals available to them in the surface of the ocean, those chemicals in the surface of the ocean are strongly impacted, if you look at the right ones, by the level of CO2 in that water.And we, to be very specific, look at the boron isotope composition of these shells. I'm a card-carrying Boron Moron, both boring and moronic, according to my friends and family. But the wonderful thing about these boron isotopes is that they give you this beautiful record of CO2 change in waters. You can equate that to CO2 change in the atmosphere, and so by measuring those shells down through layers of sediment in the deep ocean you can read back through the history of CO2 change in the atmosphere like going in through the pages of a book.Katherine BowersSo how do you get mud from the deep ocean?James RaeThere's a variety of different ways you can do this but essentially all of them involve dropping something that looks a bit like a drain pipe off the side of a ship and pulling it back up. If you want just a little bit of mud you can use really something not far off a drain pipe, but if we want to go deeper in time you use ocean drilling until you drill a core way down kilometers through the sediment to bring up older and older mud.Katherine BowersI have also a question about mud washing. So my mental image of this is when you wash mud it would just like wash away, but sediment is left. So what is mud in that sense, then?James RaeI'm using mud as, you know, my really strict sedimentary geologist colleagues wouldn't be very happy with me, I'm being a bit loose here. I'd say we're washing sediment, and we're washing it through a fine, fine sieve, right? So a sieve where each of the holes in that sieve is about 6% the size of a millimeter, and so this gets rid of really really fine clay. So kind of super microscopic mud, and it leaves behind anything that is sand-sized.And to be a bit geological about this: we're used to seeing sand on beaches. The reason for this is particles that are about as big and as heavy as sand can go down a river where the flow is quite fast, but when it hits the sea, there's no longer the same kind of fast current flow as you have in a river, and so it drops out and that's why we have beaches.So if you find sand-sized material in the middle of the open ocean, it can't have come from on land, because it would have gone down into a beach, and often we're dealing with thousands of kilometers away from land. So we know it must have come from directly above us, and so it must be made by biology. There are a couple of rare instances where you find sand or even gravel in the middle of the ocean. The only way of doing that is occasionally on the very certain, very cold conditions sand gets rafted in by icebergs, but that's a kind of unique case.Katherine BowersThat is actually very helpful for getting a visual of the work that you're doing. It's kind of hard to visualize before but now I feel like I understand it a bit better.James RaeAnd I guess I'd like to add one aspect to that. We wash a lot of mud, but then we do things that probably visually are actually much more exciting. So step one is look under a microscope at these gorgeous microfossil shells, and pick out certain species. Step two, go into a super super super clean lab where we wear white forensic suits so that we don't contaminate our samples, and we do chemical treatments on them, we dissolve up the shells, we purify out the boron which we're interested in measuring. And then step three, we put that through an enormous instrument, it's a bit like a mini version of a particle accelerator. It turns our sample into ions, it fires those down through a vacuum that's a bit like space, makes them bend a corner with a massive magnet and detects these tiny isotopic signals.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?James RaeI've always been interested in Earth's environment, in the outdoors, in nature ever since I was a kid. At school I really liked the bit of exposure I had to the earth sciences through physical geography. I liked being able to go on a walk in the hills in Scotland and understand that the glens there are formed by ancient glaciers from the last ice age, and I wanted to do more of that and to pair my interests in the sciences in particular in chemistry with our understanding of the planet and ideally with a view to understanding climate change, and so that led me to a degree in earth sciences. I absolutely loved it. And as a result I guess I've been at university ever since doing this kind of work.And this project on past climate change in particular just feels like this is something that I have been fascinated by ever since I first found out about it. I am concerned about climate change, I want to do something about it, and as somebody with some chemistry expertise and somebody who understands a bit about Earth's history, beginning to apply chemistry to Earth's history in order to better understand how our planet's climate works, seems like a good meshing together of those skills.Katherine BowersSo what is an unexpected connection that you've made in your work or that you've come across in your work?James RaeSo for this I'm gonna actually talk about a different flavor of looking at Earth's past climate. So moving away from CO2 and thinking again about the ice ages, one of the key processes that's involved in climate and indeed CO2 change during the ice ages are big changes in the ocean's circulation. So we might think of one of the most famous examples of a big current system is the one in the North Atlantic Ocean, we've got the gulf stream which brings tropical water from the Caribbean all the way up to the shores of Scotland, and means that the climate of Scotland today is much milder than the climate of Alaska despite being at a fairly similar latitude. And that's because the Atlantic has this conveyor belt type circulation that brings this warm water north. But today the pacific doesn't have a circulation system like that, and we wanted to investigate, how did the ocean circulation look during the last ice age? And we found, really to our surprise, that during the last ice age the Pacific had one of these conveyor belt type circulations a bit like the modern day Atlantic, and there's a number of cool things about this. I think the really unexpected thing was we realized that, oh my goodness, we can reconstruct the temperature of the north Pacific during the ice age, and it was actually warmer than it was today, despite the fact that the world has plunged into this ice age, because this current system is kicked off you get this warmer-than-present-day temperature.And the neat thing about a really kind of random research connection is that we realized that there was this longstanding debate in the archaeological and anthropological literature about the first settlers in North America, the first human settlers in North America, so how did the Native Americans get to North America. Broadly speaking, people all started out in Africa and moved up through Asia, and you can see that, if you look at the genetics, there is similarity in the genetics of Native American people to Asian people until about 25,000 years ago. But then there's a kind of separation if you look at the genetic coding, and you can see that there was no longer much mixing of the original Asian populations with the founding population of the original North Americans for about, you know, 5,000 to 10,000 years, and yet there's no evidence at that time that they were in America itself. So the question is, where were they, if they're no longer intermixing with their Asian ancestors but they're not yet in North America--because it would have been really hard to get to North America given the huge ice sheets covering the rockies--where were they?And so this has led to this interesting idea of the Beringian Standstill, which is that where the Bering Strait now is between Alaska and Siberia, sea level during the last ice age was actually so low that that was land. And so the idea is that people got up into this bit of land in Beringia and they hung out there for five or eight thousand years. The question has always been, what on Earth would you be doing up there during the last ice age, right? Alaska and Siberia, not habitable climates today, and your assumption would be that these would be even more harsh in the peak of the last ice age, and yet there's always been this interesting evidence that based on pollen data the climate in that region looked surprisingly mild. And the research connection that we made was that actually we think we can explain that mild climate that allowed those early human populations to inhabit Beringia for thousands of years due to the presence of this enhanced circulation system, which meant that rather than Beringia having a climate like a more harsh version of modern day Alaska, it would have looked a bit more like Scotland. And, you know, while some would argue that Scotland is perhaps barely habitable today, it's at least a very different climate system compared to Alaska.Katherine BowersThat's so interesting.James RaeI was just fascinated to stumble across this. I think it shows the value of just trying to keep a bit of a track on the literature. It was spotting a paper that came out on the genetics of ancestral North Americans, and the link to the Beringia Standstill hypothesis. This came out and in Science just at the time that I was thinking about these data from the North Pacific, and I went, wow, I wonder if I've got an explanation for that? And I tried to read up in the literature, but I'm not an archaeologist or an anthropologist by any stretch, so I wasn't that sure about this idea. Would it really hold water? What would that community think of this? And I just happened, at a conference the next summer, to sit next to, at lunch, an anthropologist who studies this exact question. And I was like, oh hey, by the way, I've got an idea about this, what do you think? And he was into it and came on board the paper to help add some expertise on this topic.Katherine BowersSo how does your work help us think about the climate emergency?James RaeI think the key way that our work helps us think about the climate emergency is giving this quite tangible picture of what our planet looks like under elevated CO2 levels. So I've talked about using these boron measurements to find out what time our planet last had a CO2 level as high as 420ppm, and the answer to that is it's about three million years ago, it's a time called the mid-pliocene warm period. And despite the fact that planet Earth looks at first order fairly similar today--the continents are in the same places, it's prior to the evolution of the human genus but it's a world dominated by mammals--but the one key difference is that CO2 is higher, and as a result there is very little ice on Greenland and there's very little ice on west Antarctica, indeed there's a forest of beech trees on the Antarctic peninsula. And as a result of that ice melt, sea level globally is at least ten meters higher than it was today, and ten meters is comfortably enough to flood all of our major coastal cities.And so this shows us I think in quite a tangible way, this doesn't rely on computer modeling, this is just a way that our planet looks when CO2 was this high, the last time in Earth's history. This is our direction of travel. We are not there yet because it takes the climate system time to catch up with elevated CO2 levels, but if we allow CO2 to persist at this elevated level, we risk heading back to the pliocene with that huge loss of ice sheets and that huge rise in sea level. So this really I hope motivates us to make sure that doesn't happen. We do have a window of time to make sure that happened. We have to put less CO2 in the atmosphere. We probably, also, have to actively take CO2 back out of the atmosphere. If we do that quick enough, there is a window to try and avoid that catastrophic melting of mass ice sheets.Katherine BowersWell, reassuring that there is some window at least because in many news reports, it seems like that that window is, I mean I know it's small, but it seems like it's shrinking rapidly.James RaeI mean there's a variety of different windows. I think an important point actually is that there's no one window which when it closes all is lost. Climate change is a steep slope that we tumble down, I don't think it's a cliff edge that we fall off. You know, 1.5° would be great, 1.6 though would be better than 1.7 and 1.7 would be better than 1.8. There is the sliding scale of impacts. Hey if we get to 2.2° there will be a whole bunch of really serious impacts, I mean we are seeing those climate impacts today at 1.2°, 1.3°, we will see more and more of them. But my goodness they will be less extreme and less severe than the climate impacts at 3° of warming. So there's always a window to make things better. The best time to reduce emissions was yesterday, but failing that, today and tomorrow.Katherine BowersWhat can earth science as a discipline contribute to the discourse around climate change today?James RaeEarth science is right at the core of climate change research. The physical science basis of the IPCC reports, this is done by earth scientists. And I think that that's a link that isn't always well understood by the public actually, that the public kind of knows about climate change, might know about the IPCC reports, you know, the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, but has this feel for this is done by climate scientists. But who are climate scientists, where do they sit? If you want to be a climate scientist, what do you study at university? And the answer typically is earth sciences or earth and environmental sciences. And so within our school we have people looking at, how will the monsoon system evolve in the future? Or what's predicted to happen to heat waves and floods? Or if a massive volcano goes off, what will that do to Earth's climate? Or how is CO2 taken up by the ocean and what impacts does that have on marine life? So we're understanding the problem from a whole range of different angles.Earth sciences is also going to be a huge part of the solution, and there's two flavors to that. The first is we need to decarbonize our energy system. That is the most important single thing to do to fix climate change. And that's going to involve digging, no more coal and oil and gas out the ground, but we will need to dig out lithium and niobium and neodemium and cobalt and all of these weird and wonderful metals that we need for green energy technologies. So that raw material requirement to decarbonize the energy system, that's a huge contribution that earth scientists, geologists in particular, will make to fixing climate change.And then the other one is, we are a field where we have the expertise to understand, what does our planet do with elevated CO2? CO2 has gone up in the atmosphere before due to big volcanoes going off, due to the release of methane from methane gas hydrates. It's never done this as quickly as it's happening now, but CO2 has gone up before and then it's come back down again, and it comes back down because it goes into trees and plants, it dissolves into the ocean, and then it reacts with rocks, both rocks on the seafloor and rocks around us on the continents. And so earth scientists are now looking at each of those processes and thinking, are there any of these that we can speed up? This is difficult stuff. There's difficult important ethical questions to ask around this. But they're important ones to think about. In all of the scenarios that the IPCC has that get us to 1.5°C or even 2°C there's a lot of this carbon dioxide removal going on. And earth scientists are the people who are grappling with how we might be able to do that.Katherine BowersThank you so much for speaking with me today. If the people want to find you, where can they find you and your work?James RaeLook me up, I'm on social media under "Mud Water Climates" because those are things that I do, and of course you can Google me, James Rae, I'm working at the University of St Andrews, I'm easy enough to find online.Katherine BowersThinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 2 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. Althea Davies is a paleoecologist and Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her research considers long-term human-environmental interactions, including the effects of prehistoric climate change on land use in the Scottish Highlands.Welcome to the thinking climate change podcast today. Could you please tell us a little about your current research project?Althea DaviesAt the moment, I'm looking into the role of large herbivores in ecosystem dynamics, especially their relationship with woodland survival and regeneration here in the Scottish Highlands. And I know it's a topic that probably prompts a few more questions than it gives answers, so maybe I'll explain a bit more about why that interests me and how it relates to the theme of your podcast.There's been lots of scientific attention, and it's got sort of popular media attention as well, on megafaunal extinction. This is the global extinction of really large animals, often with a weight over a thousand kilograms, across multiple continents, that's happened within largely the last 50,000 years, but some as recent as about 700 years ago, if we go to places like New Zealand where European colonization is much more recent.There's been a lot of interest on what effect does the extinction of these large herbivores have on ecosystem functions--things like nutrient cycling, seed dispersal --because these animals are all considered to be ecosystem engineers. Most of this attention has been given to the megafauna, and rather less to thinking about the surviving herbivores that we still share our landscapes with, and particularly how they influence our landscapes over the really long time scales that it takes for woodlands to form and for climate change to occur. So, for instance, lots of the debate around grazing animals these days tends to focus on very recent experience. So things like, there may be places that there are too many animals, and it's considered damaging, and that's certainly the case in parts of Scotland, where red deer numbers are considered to be too high. But there are also places across the world where there are thought to be too few of these herbivores, and they've been undergoing really worrying declines. For instance, in parts of Eurasia that applies to the saiga antelopes, but also it could be applied to elephants in parts of Africa. So we know a lot more about the distant past and these megaherbivores and very recent concerns, but a lot less about what happens in between.Katherine BowersThat's interesting. And could I just ask you to clarify when you talk about large herbivores, what is an example of one of those?Althea DaviesThe one that I've been focused most on is red deer, so that's the largest surviving living land mammal here in the UK.Katherine BowersWhat kinds of questions are you asking, and how do you go about finding answers for them?Althea DaviesI think one of the reasons why the topic has drawn me in is because, until relatively recently, the methods that we've got have been inadequate for answering questions about whether these much smaller, but still in a modern context large, herbivores, are they also ecosystem engineers? We think they are, but how they interact with changes in woodland cover over thousands of years, we don't really know, especially in, what can we say has happened because of large herbivores, and what can we say has happened because of climate, and how do they interact? We really don't know some of those answers, and some of our methods haven't been too great for working that out.So, for instance, for me, my main discipline is paleoecology, which really just means long term ecology, but looking beyond the things that we can see, we can observe and record in landscapes. So it's using indicators that survive in often what are called natural archives, so in peat deposits or lake mud. I guess people may be more familiar with hearing about the records that we can get about climate in ice cores. And it's similar principles, that you have these microscopic biological or chemical signals that are preserved in a sediment, a soil, or an ice record that that builds up over time. So to understand animals, we have mostly used pollen. So lots of flowering plants produce pollen that's needed to produce seeds, but lots of that pollen drifts through the atmosphere, and some of it settles out on peat bogs or lake sediments, or even ice as well, and we can recover that because it preserves really well. And that has been used to reconstruct changes in vegetation and land cover, but also to understand when there was more disturbance in the ecosystem which we would then think of relating to animals as part of the disturbance regime.But obviously pollen isn't telling us directly about the animals. It's an indirect signal, and it gets a bit, maybe a circular argument, cause we're trying to use pollen to reconstruct the vegetation as well as to detect disturbance, and try and say something about what was causing that disturbance. Obviously, it would be great if we had access to lots of animal bones to tell us how animal populations have changed in the past, but in many parts of the world, especially in the Scottish Highlands, where the soils are acidic, bone doesn't preserve very well. So that gives us small snapshots, but not a really long-term record.So we're now able to use a few different methods. One of those is fungal spores, because, believe it or not, there are fungi that actually need dung to complete their life cycle, so they are dependent on animal dung. And their spores are of similar microscopic size to pollen grains, and they also drift through the environment and land in these natural archives, so we can use them to say there was changes in the amount of dung in the landscape which then tells us something about the animals that were producing the dung. So that comes from paleoecology, and it's also been used to detect the megafaunal extinctions.But then we can also use methods that have been developed in archaeology and archaeological science. So there's a class of chemical compounds called biomarkers, and they come in many different formats. Some of them tell us about climate, but there are also some that tell us about feces. So back to the dung, there are fecal biomarkers that we can use to say something about animals. And the benefit of the biomarkers is that archaeologists have worked to establish that some of the biomarker compounds can actually help us differentiate between the different types of animals that were present in past landscapes, which is something that neither the pollen nor the fungal spores can do. So we've got a really great opportunity to use what we could call multiple proxies, and proxies are indirect measures, to try and reconstruct how animal populations have changed, and then relate that to other forms of evidence that will tell us about climate. So we can start having a better picture of how these things relate to each other on timescales of thousands of years.Katherine BowersIt's amazing to me how you can use parts of the natural world around us today to reconstruct what existed thousands of years ago, or hundreds of years ago, and then how that can tell us things about the present. Would you say that it's possible to use the past in this way to tell us about the future?Althea DaviesYes, but it's a bit trickier. So my work is focused more on the past, especially the recent past. I've worked with historians as well, because there are really great agricultural census data sets that tell us about animal change over a very recent past that we can start to layer up with these longer datasets. I don't use models to predict the future, which you can do using these long term past datasets. I think of it more as thinking, what effect does changes in grazing levels, what effect do they have on biodiversity, for instance? And if we want to restore biodiversity in certain landscapes, like parts of the Scottish Highlands, then we can say something about the levels of grazing that we need to help us achieve those future goals. So I tend to use it more as a heuristic guide to help us achieve what we'd want to do in the future, rather than trying to predict from the past through to the future.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?Althea DaviesI guess there were two things, really. When I moved up to Scotland to do my PhD, it was based in a valley in the North-West Scottish Highlands, and it was a very new environment and unfamiliar to me, and when I first went there I thought it was very bleak and quite depressing. But as I did my PhD research, I really learnt about the subtle beauty of the landscape, and I really wanted to know how people who used to live there, what did they think of their landscape? There's lots of writing, poetry. This is a marginal landscape. But I wanted to know, did the people who lived there in prehistory, in the recent past, did they think of themselves in that way? And we tend to think that animals played a really important part in their life, in their sense of place, their livelihoods, because the soils are not suitable for lots of cultivation, so animals are really their main form of wealth, to help them survive, and as the basis for their livelihoods.So the more I learned about that, and learned about the archeology, sort of drew me into wanting to understand the landscape better, and that led into not just doing paleoecology. I started learning how to do social science and doing interviews with people who are working and living in these landscapes now and managing them. So it's the people who live there and manage these future goals of what they want to preserve and manage for the future. And so I did quite a few years work on woodland restoration, but also particularly some of the tensions around deer management, because deer don't belong to anyone. So they're a common pool resource, if you like. And lots of landscapes across the Scottish Highlands, not all properties have fences to delimit them. So the deer wander between different people's properties, and so different landowners want different things from the deer. Someone might want higher levels because they have interest in shooting deer for sport or protection for the wild venison. And there are people who want fewer deer, particularly where they want woodland regeneration to be more successful. So I worked with deer managers and other researchers to try and work out how we could find common ground.It's that mixture of knowing about the deeper history of the landscape and the people who've made their living there, and some of the complexities of people trying to still live there and work out how to live without coming into conflict with all of their neighbors, that have really drawn me to want to know more about, what is a natural baseline when we think about the Highlands? What would a more natural population of deer look like? So it's really those things that drew me to want to know more and combine paleoecology with archeology, and where I can to try and do some of this work with current land managers.Katherine BowersWhat is an unexpected connection that you have made in your work? I know that there must be some, especially working across disciplines the way you do, because often true interdisciplinarity creates these very vibrant connections that sometimes surprises in many ways. I wonder if you've come across anything like that in your work?Althea DaviesIt's a tough question to answer, because I guess it's more about me learning about the other disciplines and the sorts of stories that they can tell, especially when and why some of the landowners started getting more concerned about boundaries in their landscape rather than shared resources. So I've learnt a huge amount, especially from working with historians, about that. So for me, I guess my unexpected connection is more about doing interdisciplinary research, I think, and the joys and the complexities of learning to work with other people, and the joy of finding people with a similar mindset to you who have that curiosity, where we want to find out things that neither of our disciplines on their own can answer.So one of the findings deepened some of the ideas that I already had around the landscape, but it also filled them out by giving details that I couldn't produce from paleoecology. So, working with historians, I learnt that about the structure of farming communities before the Industrial Revolution and how diverse they were. They were made up not just of one family, but might have been multiple communities, townships they were sometimes called, and their pattern across the landscape involved not giant fields, the sort of big fields that we're used to now, but a patchwork that really meant that they supported quite a lot of biodiversity, because they had a real variety of land uses and areas of different disturbance and nutrient enrichment. And once we get into the Industrial Revolution, lots of these townships were replaced by extensive sheep farms, or in some cases deer forest, so where forest actually means areas for deer rather than necessarily lots of trees. And so by bringing the paleoecology together with the history, we really had this much better understanding of how important it is to think about landscape mosaics if we want to maintain or restore biodiversity, and the importance of grazing as a factor within that.Katherine BowersHow does your work help us think about the climate emergency?Althea DaviesI don't think my work directly addresses it. I think a long term perspective has its limits with dealing with current issues, because obviously the factors that have led to the current situation are often so different, or there was an accumulation of so many things, that the situation that we haven't directly faced in the past. But I think they can help us think very carefully about change, recognize that many of the things that we worry about are invisible because they take place over long timescales. Lots of processes and ecosystems, they don't necessarily respond immediately, they might respond slowly, so we have a lagged response. So it's trying to put that awareness and warning signals in when we think about the climate emergency, and that not every change will be something that we can see immediately.Katherine BowersWhat can paleoecology as a discipline contribute to the discourse around climate change today?Althea DaviesI think maybe there are three things that they can contribute, or at least from my areas of interest.The first of those is to think about a world being transformed. We're so used to familiar landscapes--when I say "us" I think I mean Western society, when we're quite insulated from many of the more extreme aspects of current climate change--I think it's us as the major consumers that need to be much more aware of how much change is going to come our way, and I think the past can help tell us stories about how much change has happened, and think much more about the sort of rippling consequences, the cascades of factors that are coming our way, and use stories in ways that are not purely about entertainment or thinking about crisis, but really thinking carefully about how climate change is going to affect the things that we value.And I think that means the second area where I think paleoecology contributes is that it gives us a reality check, it helps us recognize that we can't turn the clock back and simply put back ecosystems that used to exist. But it can help us give a better understanding of all the things over multiple timescales that have shaped the world as it is now, the things that we value as well, and but also help us think about, when can we resist change? Because sometimes there are things, ecosystems or communities, that we think maybe have a very high cultural value, for instance a national park, or a very high conservation value. And I think, seeing how much change is the normality over long time scales, can maybe help us think more carefully about how much we can resist change, and when we really need to make some tough choices, and accept that we will lose some of the things that we would prefer to preserve. So I think it's a bit of an ecological reality check that we sometimes need to help us be pushed to make decisions about. We have limited finance to restore lots of ecosystems, so we will need to make tough choices.And then the final one, I think, is a bit more positive, and that's thinking about the relationships between people and nature, and learning from examples of when they actually support one another. It's not all about doom and gloom. So thinking about, for instance, going back to one of my favorite ecosystems, woodlands, there are woodlands where we know that people have managed them over very long time scales. So the beeches that might look natural to us now are really the product of long cultural interaction. And so that gives us a signal that if there are values there, and often biodiversity values, we need people to be involved and work with these habitats and invest in active management to maintain biocultural diversity. I think that is a more positive way of seeing the relationships between people and nature.Katherine BowersThank you so much for sharing your work today. It has been a pleasure to speak to you and to learn more about the research that you have been doing. If the audience is interested in learning more about your work, where can they find you?Althea DaviesI don't have a personal web page, so the best places to go are my university page, if you just search for my name at the University of St Andrews, or look on Researchgate, where I put details of the publications and projects as well.Katherine BowersThank you again.Thinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 3 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. Stephanie O'Rourke is an art historian and Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her current research project examines the way the European visual artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depicted landscapes and, through them, the changing attitudes about the natural world.Welcome to the podcast. To begin could you please tell us a little about your current research project.Stephanie O'RourkeWell first of all, thanks so much for having me be part of this conversation with you.So I'm an art historian. I'm mainly thinking about visual material of the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth century in Western Europe and some of its colonial networks. I've recently been working on a book about the relationship between landscape and extraction, resource extracting industries such as timber harvesting, which was really important in that moment, as well as ore mining, coal mining, things like that. One of the larger aims here is to think about how a kind of depletion-based way of relating to the natural world was visualized in this period, because this is really the emergence of industrial modernity in Europe. I mean it's a bit earlier than the existing histories we have, so for instance, I'm wondering about how certain ways of picturing the natural environment enable an extractive way of understanding it, but also trying to query whether there were forms of picturing the natural environment that introduced friction into the protocols of extraction, in the moment that extraction is being consolidated and becoming increasingly important to how Western European economies are being run.Katherine BowersSo you've already talked a little bit about this in your first answer, but I'm wondering, what are some of the questions that you're asking, some of perhaps the bigger questions that your project asks, and how do you go about finding answers for them?Stephanie O'RourkeThat's a very good question. Maybe not as straightforward to answer as I might wish. I would say on a concrete level one of the questions that my project tries to raise is to look anew at what is being pictured in landscape paintings, but not just landscape paintings. There are things that we now understand as part of industrial extraction, for instance around timber management, but also illicit activities that worked around the margins of timber management and that were legislated against to protect the timber industry, such as gathering for sticks and things like that, these illegal uses of the woods. We've got these seemingly very bucolic paintings of peasants in woods and now we can look at them and understand this is a contested space. These peasants were engaging in activities that were being outlawed through national efforts to protect the interests of the timber industry. So that would be an example of what is being represented and thinking anew about that. Or in another portion of this project I look at mining, some of these mountains that were being portrayed were understood as sites of mining. In fact, mining powered entire regional economies in for instance parts of southern and eastern Germany. So we talk about these mining landscapes as if they're about the sublime, and I'm suggesting that they're instead about what's beneath the surface of the mountain, they're actually about mining as a new way of relating to that environment.So with what is being shown, those are two examples. And I think another question that I try to raise in this project is how is something being shown? For this I'm interested in looking at visual material that exceeds what we traditionally define as a landscape. That's one of the hows of how I'm uncovering this. With my work on German mountain communities I'm also looking at the diagrams that are printed in these early mineralogical texts, and so for instance, what I'm asking is, how is this natural environment being shown in a way that enables people to think of it in extractive terms? I would be looking at the way that it flattens this really complex terrain into something both flat and seemingly very simple, when you impose a scale or numerical grid onto something this implies a landscape, a terrain that can be kind of rationalized, optimized, managed. These are some of the protocols of extractive capitalism that will be brought to bear on those physical environments.And likewise there are related questions about whether sight itself, whether vision can be extractive, specifically in the sense of recognizing looking at a physical environment and visualizing something in a way that imagines how easy it would be to sort of pluck it out and set it into circulation as a commodity. So I think there are ways of picturing that encourage the viewer to see a specific feature as extractable, and likewise there are ways of picturing that require the viewer to take a long time, and it's difficult to sort of disaggregate different features of the natural world in a landscape, and so I'm querying, is that a way of picturing, a way of viewing, that thwarts the market imperatives of extraction?Katherine BowersDo you find that some of the artists that you're looking at when they're painting these, or when they're depicting things like for example the peasants that are engaged in illegal activities on land, is the depiction of those politicized, or is this simply artists working towards a specific kind of aesthetic of the peasant on the land without that political lens?Stephanie O'RourkeThat's a good question. I think it's very difficult to say because there are also larger questions about who pictures are for. So for instance, would an aristocratic patron find it non-threatening and delightful even to see this traditional practice being commemorated even at the very moment that they know it's coming under threat? There were some artists that we know were appealing for the preservation of for instance historical woodlands long before the environmentalism movement, and so that's a particularly rich example where you can say, this is the way they're picturing the woodlands and here are the letters that they wrote to Napoleon III asking for those woodlands to be protected. And so we feel comfortable saying there is this sort of proto-ecological activism that is the politics of this image. But interestingly, with the German Romantics in particular, quite a few of them were mining administrators or were somehow engaged in the mining economy. So Goethe was employed as a mining administrator, Novalis. So even though we understand these thinkers to be embracing a kind of natural philosophy which sees complete oneness between the self and the natural world, they were also descending into mines and drafting up charts for how to optimize the extraction of these metal ores, and they're overseeing mining structures, so it's not always obvious from first glance, what the politics of one of these artworks is going to be.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?Stephanie O'RourkeI think like you I'm wondering about what kinds of historical methods and also historical insights can be mobilized in the present day, and at least in the case of art history, we've talked a long time about industrialization. There's no surprise that that's one of the major shifts that's happening in nineteenth century Europe, but it's difficult to be more precise about what the mechanisms of that were. And I think especially industrialization, it tends to draw your focus to what humans are doing in relation to things like built infrastructure, what they're doing in relation to technologies. It's certainly a really important place to think about what's happening with class and labor. But today obviously one of the pressing concerns we have is, whether it's going to be possible to shift the way that humans relate to the natural world, and so I wanted to frame a historical question that focused on how such a relationship came to be installed in European visual culture in the first place. Maybe to kind of excavate what the early history of that was, so that's why I tried to focus instead on extraction, not just extraction but kind of a use-based way of relating to the natural world.Katherine BowersSo what is an unexpected connection that you have made in your work? Do you find that the things that you've found as you've researched more into this are what you expected to find, or do you find that there are some connections or some resonances that you perhaps would not have anticipated when you started this project?Stephanie O'RourkeOne of the broader trends in environmental history, literature, and in art history is ecocriticism, which often entails recovering an ecological vantage point in a historical artwork. So something that prioritizes the interconnectedness and interdependency and biodiversity of a given environment. We assume that artworks that enshrine those characteristics therefore also have a kind of ideological opposition to subordinating the natural world to economic imperatives, and that's not what I was trying to do. I was trying to inhabit a more historical vantage point. But the problem is that obviously I'm doing so from the present day which is animated by these extremely specific concerns.There was something that came up when I was researching timber management in France and in colonial Algeria that really struck me, both in the way that it differed from the present day and then in this unexpected way that it anticipated the present day. So I was looking at these mid-nineteenth century French landscapes of forests, and the main ways that we have to understand these are firstly that they're part of a broader trend of naturalism, getting closer to nature, depicting nature with greater particularity, more emphasis on transient atmospheric conditions, the sense of, this is what this specific place looked like at this moment under these conditions, and the idea that you could have some sort of intimacy to that landscape. Also in a related way, at least one of the artists was involved in advocating for the preservation of some historic woodlands, so we do know that he did have these concerns.But when I was researching it I found that not just this one artist but quite a few artists at the time were not just painting these woodlands but they were painting a lot of flood scenes, and that's because in the first half of the nineteenth century France came to understand itself as a country that was really plagued by damaging flooding, and they specifically believed that the flooding was the result of deforestation. So this is a country that, there was quite devastating flooding in the 1820s, 30s and 40s, so when I was looking at a flood scene from the 1850s I came to understand that even 150 years ago the French were saying a certain extraction industry has been operating without constraints and it has destabilized our climate in ways that are threatening our agriculture, our way of life, etc. And I hadn't expected to find that, and what I encountered when I looked into it was actually that people wrote extensively about the notion that the climate of territorial France was extremely dependent on what was happening in colonial Algeria at the time. There was a lot of debate about the Sahara Desert potentially expanding if they were allowed to cut down trees in the wrong places and then the desert sands were going to blow through Algeria and threaten France's colonial possession of it. On the other hand it was extensively theorized by some scientists that the warm air over the Sahara blew northward and hovered over France, and so the idea was that France had this temperate climate for how far north it was because of the forest management that they were undertaking in colonial Algeria. So there is this colonial climate project going on. What also surprised me about it was that a there was a very refined understanding in this moment of landscapes being connected across vast distances. When I'm looking at a French painting of an Algerian forest, I understand that the viewers in the Paris salon, they understand the climatological space of Paris and of the scene of this French Algerian forest as being interconnected. And that really surprised me.Katherine BowersAnd that's a level of interconnectivity that's not apparent at first viewing, right? You might see the colonial aspect of that of that painting but not necessarily the fact that those Parisian viewers would feel the reality of the warmth of the painting as part of their climateological experience.Stephanie O'RourkeI think that's exactly right. I think that's really beautifully put.Katherine BowersSo how does your work help us think about the climate emergency that we are experiencing today?Stephanie O'RourkeIn my research I tried to be realistic and practical. I haven't found it especially useful or especially possible to follow the calls of certain ecocritical activists about, you know, embracing radical solidarity with our gut biome. Even though that sounds great. I think what I'm trying to to focus on in the research is a very workmanlike understanding of the fact that images, like narratives, are tools that we use to manage our relationship to our environment, how we understand that relationship. And I do think it's possible to better appreciate how certain ways of literally perceiving it encourage us or enable us to see ourselves as completely separate from it, and able to sort of get things out of it willy-nilly. I also think it's useful to look at historical images that don't enable that and to query, you know, what would it look like in the present day to picture the natural world in a way that doesn't enable us to have this sort of extractive fantasy about it. Ultimately though I don't think I've recovered amazing strategies of resistance in the nineteenth century archive, but I do think it's possible to take more seriously the idea that images can enable or can disable extractive ways of understanding the natural world and they have done that in the past and I think they do do that now.Katherine BowersSo what can art history as a discipline contribute to the discourse around climate change today?Stephanie O'RourkeI think that this is a question many humanistic disciplines are asking themselves, especially with renewed urgency as things like funding structures are changing, and art history, one of the many things it has going for it is that there is a sensory immediacy to an encounter with an artwork that can cut through a lot of cultural noise and that can also cut through some of the cultural hierarchies by which people feel estranged from certain experiences and certain cultural products. So I think that there's a lot of scope for contemporary artists to intervene with how we relate to our environment, how we understand our place in the history of it, and I think art history can also do a lot to excavate the aesthetic and maybe some of the affective dimensionalities of how we've come to internalize an extractive way of relating to the natural world, and at the very least a better understanding of that is going to make it seem less naturalized, less sort of inevitable, maybe a bit less hegemonic. And I think beyond that the question is very much up for debate. But I see an enormous kind of creativity that's emerging in art history as people are challenging themselves with that question.Katherine BowersWell thank you for speaking with me today. This has been a really interesting conversation about the possibilities that art history and that your work in particular looking at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape depiction holds for thinking through climate change. I'm wondering, if our listeners are interested in finding your work, where can they find it?Stephanie O'RourkeWell they could they could Google my name. And I have an academic web page and I've also got a personal website that has versions of my scholarship that aren't behind paywalls. And on that website they'll also find a link to a podcast that I did about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geology, which I think is not thinking about climate in the way that your project is but might have some interesting other stories along the way that people could check out.Katherine BowersEnlightenment Rocks? Stephanie O'RourkeThat's right, Enlightenment Rocks!Katherine BowersFantastic.Stephanie O'RourkeGreat. Well thank you so much for and having me on to talk about this and I really look forward to seeing what you do with the rest of the project.Katherine BowersIt's been a pleasure.Thinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 4 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. Andrea Burke is a geochemist, paleoclimatologist, and Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the forcings and mechanisms of natural climate and carbon cycle change through geochemical records of past climatic events.So hello, thank you so much for talking to me today. Could you please tell us a little about your current research project?Andrea BurkeI'm currently really interested in using the past history of large volcanic eruptions as sort of a set of natural experiments with our climate systems. So volcanic eruptions, when they erupt they emit sulfur dioxide gas, and that sulfur dioxide gets oxidized into sulfate aerosols, which are tiny little particles that act to reflect incoming solar radiation or sunlight. And this acts to cool the planet. So for instance, in 1991 there was the Pinatubo eruption, and that led to a global cooling of our planet by 0.6°C, which is quite substantial. And this is a short-term cooling, it lasted for about 3 years. So these volcanic eruptions provide a natural experiment of our climate system where you have a forcing on the climate, the volcanic aerosols, and then you can look at the climate response. And so this allows us to tell something about climate sensitivity and how sensitive our climate is to these external forces, and it also allows us to look at what feedbacks in the climate system are important. And so what I've been doing is looking at ice core records of volcanic sulfate, and using isotopes to fingerprint them and tell us something about how much sulfur made it up into the upper levels of the atmosphere, and thus stuck around for a long time and had a big climate impact, and using that to try and get at the sort of climate sensitivity of our planet. And the nice thing about the volcanic eruptions is that we have hundreds of them in the past that we can look at.Katherine BowersSo what kind of questions are you asking, and how do you go about finding answers for them?Andrea BurkeThe main approach I'm using is looking at sulfur isotopes in ice cores. An isotope is an atom of an element that has a different number of neutrons. So for instance in sulfur, you've got sulfur-32 which is made up of 16 protons and 16 neutrons. You can measure the ratio of these isotopes and that can tell you about the pathway that the sulfate aerosol traveled and a bit of information about the residence time, how long that sulfate molecule stayed in the atmosphere. And that allows us to say, well how much radiative forcing did that volcanic eruption have? And so that's the method I'm using, and the question that we're tackling with that is, well what is the climate response to these volcanic eruptions? And this has implications for how climate will respond to other forcing such as greenhouse gases, which goes in the opposite direction, the greenhouse gases act to warm, but the feedbacks that operate on the planet are the same. So that's really the motivation for this work.Katherine BowersSo how do you get the material that that you are looking at?Andrea BurkeThere's lots of ice cores that have been drilled both in Greenland and in Antarctica, which are the main places I get them from. When they get drilled they have initial samples run and then they've got an archive piece that remains in an ice core repository. So dotted around the world there are these large freezers that store these ice cores that have been drilled over the last several decades. So you can put in a sample request to either the scientists who drilled them or more generally to the core repository that they're housed in, and you can access the samples. All these ice cores tend to have very high resolution measurements of sulfate, so you can then figure out the depths that you need to sample to get a specific volcanic peak in sulfate. So you get to spend a couple of chilly days in a freezer cutting ice, and then conveniently, the first step in the process is that you melt the ice, for my measurements, and so you don't have to keep them frozen, so we can then just ship them back to the lab as melted ice samples, essentially.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?Andrea BurkeThat's an interesting question. I've always dabbled in a lot of different geochemical techniques. I'm very motivated by trying to understand past climate change. I think one of the real beauties is that it provides so much extra data to put our current climate change into context. And geochemistry, and in particular isotope geochemistry which is the type of geochemistry I do, is really useful for trying to decode what past climate change looked like. So that's really been my motivating interest over the course of my career.But in particular this project I loved. I got into it because when I started my postdoc I wanted to learn a new technique, and I did a postdoc at Caltech, so my PhD was looking at changes in ocean circulation, transitioning from the last glacial maximum, the ice age 20,000 years ago, to today, and how changes in ocean circulation led to the change in atmospheric CO2 that occurred over that time. So I did a lot of uranium series isotopes, I did radiocarbon, things like that. And when I started my postdoc I thought, oh I'd quite like to learn a new technique, and at Caltech Jess Adkins had just started setting up a new way of measuring sulfur isotopes which I found quite exciting. I was initially intrigued by just the new method and the opportunities it opened. And the real beauty of this new method of measuring sulfur isotopes by a multicollector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer is that you need very little sample. You need very little sulfur to make a measurement. And I did something that's maybe a little less paleoclimaty but still quite relevant for climate, which was looking at weathering in rivers. So I looked at a global budget of how much pyrite oxidation we have in rivers, because it has implications for whether or not weathering on land takes up CO2, so it acts as a sink for CO2, or whether it actually acts as a source of CO2. And it was really unconstrained when I started my postdoc, and so I did a lot of that, and that was my main postdoc project.Towards the end of my time at Caltech I got put in touch with ice core scientist Joe McConnell at the desert research institute in Reno, Nevada, who had some interesting ice core samples that he was keen to have sulfur ice strips measured on, and because they were so low in sulfur they needed this new method that we were using at Caltech. That was right at the end of my postdoc. Then when I moved to St Andrews in 2014 I spent most of my time setting up the method here and perfecting it--well not perfecting, it's never perfect, but improving it and applying it to a whole bunch of interesting eruptions over the last two thousand years.Katherine BowersSo what is an unexpected connection that you have made in your work.Andrea BurkeOne thing that I've found, I just had a paper out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS, that shows that the temperature response, which is reconstructed by tree rings--the northern hemisphere summer temperature response to volcanic eruptions that are in the high latitudes, so the extratropics--it's about seven times cooler response to the same loading of sulfur from a tropical eruption. And that really goes against what people typically assume in terms of which eruptions are going to have the largest impact on climate.Part of the story is that the tree rings are really recording northern hemisphere temperatures and the eruptions are in the northern hemisphere, and so you're concentrating that sulfur aerosol load in the hemisphere. So you get a little bit more bang for your buck for your sulfur. But it can't be the whole thing, so that really points to a very strong response of feedbacks in the northern hemisphere, a climate feedback such as sea ice feedback which is a positive feedback. So you cool after an eruption, and that cooling of the surface ocean for instance in the Arctic and the North Atlantic leads the growth of sea ice, and then that sea ice is white, so it reflects more incoming sunlight, and so that gives you more cooling, so then you can grow more sea ice. So this amplifying feedback process really amplifies the temperature response to volcanic eruptions. That's been a really fun project to work on. I showed that three of the last five coldest decades in the last two thousand years, so the coldest decades in the last two thousand years, three of them are all associated with these large extratropical eruptions, and we had a very large temperature response to that. So I think that's the first paper I think which will sort of arc into lots of different interesting studies with climate models and things like that that we can do to try and understand the process.Katherine BowersIt's so interesting how many different aspects of the natural world, today's natural world, you can use to see glimpses or to understand the past and past climate change, past climate fluctuation, temperature fluctuation, right? So tree rings, ice cores, parts of the ocean, I find that fascinating.Andrea BurkeI do too. It's hooked me ever since.Katherine BowersHow does your work help us think about the climate emergency?Andrea BurkeI think my work provides some useful context. For instance that finding I just told you about really points at these really strong high latitude feedbacks, those sea ice feedbacks, and the strength of that in driving the climate system to an external forcing. And while I've been looking at coolings you can you can sort of flip it on its head and think, oh actually these warmings are going to be really important, right? So the warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions--we see reduced sea ice in the Arctic and the North Atlantic, that's going to have a positive feedback in the other way, and indeed we do see what's known as this Arctic amplification, we get really warm temperatures, much greater temperature change at the poles. So I think using these volcanic eruptions can really allow us to put our current change into context.I think as well, there are continued discussions about sulfate geoengineering. Geoengineering is a word that you might use to say, somehow engineer the Earth's system to mitigate climate change. That's what geoengineering means. And in particular sulfate stratospheric injections is the process by which you inject a bunch of sulfur into the stratosphere, the high altitudes of the atmosphere, similar to a volcanic eruption, just like that Pinatubo one in 1991, you'll get a cooling because you'll reflect more incoming solar radiation.Now it's quite controversial. It will give a cooling. That's pretty well known. But it doesn't actually fix the problem. First off, we still will have lots of CO2 in our atmosphere, and so it's like a really bad band-aid. But it would provide a short term cooling. But I think what's really interesting about this work that I'm doing with volcanoes is it's really highlighting our lack of understanding of exactly how the climate will respond to different regions, and so there's very much a different regional pattern that you can see in tree rings, there will be changes in precipitation that are difficult to predict. There's really a lot of uncertainties which add to, well let's maybe not just make our environmental problems worse by trying to engineer ourselves out of them. So I think it provides some interesting context to that debate, essentially.Katherine BowersWhat do geochemistry and paleoclimatology as disciplines contribute to the discourse around climate change today?Andrea BurkeI think in particular using geochemistry to reconstruct past climates allows us to really expand the amount of data that we have on our climate system. You know, we're currently doing one big experiment with our climate system. We are adding CO2 at quite large rates to the atmosphere and we're seeing a temperature response. That's experiment number one, and unfortunately we're in it, and it's really hard to make future projections because there's a lot of uncertainty and we only have 100 years of data, of observations or whatever.Katherine BowersAnd it's not exactly a controlled experiment.Andrea BurkeExactly, and so by expanding back, and also looking at longer term changes and things like that, we just don't have the length of the records, and so you really need to look into the past, not just to expand the data set but expand the range of climate states and climate forcings that the climate system has been exposed to. I think it provides a really useful set of observations, with their inherent uncertainties of course. But it does provide useful observations.So for instance there's this metric in climate science called equilibrium climate sensitivity, which is essentially the temperature response for doubling of CO2 once the whole earth system's in equilibrium. It's a really difficult number to get at, and that's really one of the main uncertainties in projecting future climate change. And the uncertainty on what this number is hasn't improved for decades, so it's still quite a large range, we don't really know it very well. But arguably the best improvement on the uncertainty on this number has come from a statistical approach of using both models, but also paleoclimate observations from really different climate states like the last glacial maximum, the last ice age, to try and get at that number, and this work has shown an improvement. It really highlights the benefit of saying, okay, well let's look at this Earth's climate when we're in an ice age, we know what the atmospheric CO2 was then from ice core measurements, we can reconstruct what the temperature is, that's another point in what this climate sensitivity is. And so, moving forwards, I think there's a lot more interdisciplinary work between people who study past climates and people studying the modern climate change that I think is really quite exciting, and I think it can open up very interesting new avenues of research.Katherine BowersGreat. Well thank you so much for talking with me today. Where can the people find you if they are interested in learning more about your work?Andrea BurkeProbably the best thing to do is to Google me. My website's probably out of date, but I'm Andrea Burke at St Andrews, and so you can see my recent publications and probably a slightly out-of-date website.Katherine BowersThank you.Andrea BurkeThank you.Katherine BowersThinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 1 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. James Rae is an earth scientist and Reader at the University Of St Andrews. His research investigates Earth's past climate history using geochemical measurements on archives including sediments, fossils and ice cores.So thank you so much for joining me today. Could you please tell us a little about your current research project?James RaeYeah, for sure. So my research looks at the history of Earth's climate to try and understand better where we're headed in the future. There's a couple of big flavors to this. One is, I look at the ice ages. These are times that are quite recently in Earth's history--that is recently for a geologist, right? A mere thousand years ago, there was a kilometer of ice on top of where I'm currently sat here in St Andrews, and a very different climate, lower CO2, an altered ocean circulation state, changes in biotas. It was the last time that climate was really really different. And so by looking at those altered climate states we can try and better understand how our climate system operates.And then the other flavor of my research, again looking at different climates in the past, but rather than the cold climates of the ice age looking at the warmer climates of the more distant geological past, and there our key aim is to find out an answer to what is I think a really fundamental question which is, CO2 today is at 423 parts per million in the atmosphere. It's the key driver of modern climate change. What did our planet look like the last time that it had 423 ppms in the atmosphere? And so to do that we are making long-term reconstructions of atmospheric CO2 and then we're looking at the climate states associated with those different CO2 levels.Katherine BowersSo what kind of questions are you asking and how do you go about finding answers for them?James RaeSo the big question on CO2 is--we've done this incredible thing to the planet, right? We're running this wild experiment and we are right in the middle of it and it hasn't finished, right? Even if we were to stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere today, our planet is still playing catch up, our climate system is playing catch up, to equilibrate with 420ppm of CO2. Why does it take a bit of time to catch up to that level of CO2? Well one easy way to think about this is, it takes a long time to heat up water, and water in the bottom of the ocean has been there for a thousand years so it doesn't know anything about climate change. It gets upwells, goes, oh my goodness it got warmer up here, and it sucks out a little bit of heat from the atmosphere. So it takes our climate system some time to equilibrate with elevated CO2, and we want to know, what will the results of that experiment look like, by the time the climate equilibrates to higher CO2 levels?So one way of doing that is, you can ask that question to a computer model, dial up CO2, and you can ask this question to the your best representation of Earth's climate system as we can do it in the form of a whole load of equations: what does our planet look like with CO2? And models do an amazing job of a bunch of aspects of our climate system, but as we try and get to these really long timescales, they're both quite difficult to run, and there are uncertainties on the things like the behavior of big ice sheets that are still tricky questions for us to grapple with.So a complimentary way to try and answer this question is to look at Earth's past, so I guess my very specific question is, what time is CO2 420ppm? And how we go about answering that is, we need to find something that was around way back in the geological past that recorded atmospheric CO2 levels. And this is quite a tough nut to crack. For the last million years you've got these beautiful records like the fossil record of the atmosphere which is made up of bubbles in Antarctic ice cores, and that's great, but only for the last million years, and most of the last million years has been colder than present. It was in and out of an ice age. And then beyond a million years we just run out of ice, most of it has melted or flowed away, so we need a different archive to look at.The archive that I'm engaged in, you're interrogating, is the record of deep sea mud from the deep ocean floor, and in particular when you take that mud and you wash it, which sounds like a pretty, I don't know, boring or perhaps kind of esoteric thing to do, mud washing--it's actually something that I employ a bunch of undergraduates to do because it's not the most interesting work, but it's super important--because when you wash that mud and you get out all the really fine clay particles, what you see is something that looks like sand, and when you put it under a microscope you see that that sand is actually made up of millions of tiny shells. And because these shells are growing in sea water, they're plankton, essentially, so they're growing in the surface of the ocean and they're growing from the chemicals available to them in the surface of the ocean, those chemicals in the surface of the ocean are strongly impacted, if you look at the right ones, by the level of CO2 in that water.And we, to be very specific, look at the boron isotope composition of these shells. I'm a card-carrying Boron Moron, both boring and moronic, according to my friends and family. But the wonderful thing about these boron isotopes is that they give you this beautiful record of CO2 change in waters. You can equate that to CO2 change in the atmosphere, and so by measuring those shells down through layers of sediment in the deep ocean you can read back through the history of CO2 change in the atmosphere like going in through the pages of a book.Katherine BowersSo how do you get mud from the deep ocean?James RaeThere's a variety of different ways you can do this but essentially all of them involve dropping something that looks a bit like a drain pipe off the side of a ship and pulling it back up. If you want just a little bit of mud you can use really something not far off a drain pipe, but if we want to go deeper in time you use ocean drilling until you drill a core way down kilometers through the sediment to bring up older and older mud.Katherine BowersI have also a question about mud washing. So my mental image of this is when you wash mud it would just like wash away, but sediment is left. So what is mud in that sense, then?James RaeI'm using mud as, you know, my really strict sedimentary geologist colleagues wouldn't be very happy with me, I'm being a bit loose here. I'd say we're washing sediment, and we're washing it through a fine, fine sieve, right? So a sieve where each of the holes in that sieve is about 6% the size of a millimeter, and so this gets rid of really really fine clay. So kind of super microscopic mud, and it leaves behind anything that is sand-sized.And to be a bit geological about this: we're used to seeing sand on beaches. The reason for this is particles that are about as big and as heavy as sand can go down a river where the flow is quite fast, but when it hits the sea, there's no longer the same kind of fast current flow as you have in a river, and so it drops out and that's why we have beaches.So if you find sand-sized material in the middle of the open ocean, it can't have come from on land, because it would have gone down into a beach, and often we're dealing with thousands of kilometers away from land. So we know it must have come from directly above us, and so it must be made by biology. There are a couple of rare instances where you find sand or even gravel in the middle of the ocean. The only way of doing that is occasionally on the very certain, very cold conditions sand gets rafted in by icebergs, but that's a kind of unique case.Katherine BowersThat is actually very helpful for getting a visual of the work that you're doing. It's kind of hard to visualize before but now I feel like I understand it a bit better.James RaeAnd I guess I'd like to add one aspect to that. We wash a lot of mud, but then we do things that probably visually are actually much more exciting. So step one is look under a microscope at these gorgeous microfossil shells, and pick out certain species. Step two, go into a super super super clean lab where we wear white forensic suits so that we don't contaminate our samples, and we do chemical treatments on them, we dissolve up the shells, we purify out the boron which we're interested in measuring. And then step three, we put that through an enormous instrument, it's a bit like a mini version of a particle accelerator. It turns our sample into ions, it fires those down through a vacuum that's a bit like space, makes them bend a corner with a massive magnet and detects these tiny isotopic signals.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?James RaeI've always been interested in Earth's environment, in the outdoors, in nature ever since I was a kid. At school I really liked the bit of exposure I had to the earth sciences through physical geography. I liked being able to go on a walk in the hills in Scotland and understand that the glens there are formed by ancient glaciers from the last ice age, and I wanted to do more of that and to pair my interests in the sciences in particular in chemistry with our understanding of the planet and ideally with a view to understanding climate change, and so that led me to a degree in earth sciences. I absolutely loved it. And as a result I guess I've been at university ever since doing this kind of work.And this project on past climate change in particular just feels like this is something that I have been fascinated by ever since I first found out about it. I am concerned about climate change, I want to do something about it, and as somebody with some chemistry expertise and somebody who understands a bit about Earth's history, beginning to apply chemistry to Earth's history in order to better understand how our planet's climate works, seems like a good meshing together of those skills.Katherine BowersSo what is an unexpected connection that you've made in your work or that you've come across in your work?James RaeSo for this I'm gonna actually talk about a different flavor of looking at Earth's past climate. So moving away from CO2 and thinking again about the ice ages, one of the key processes that's involved in climate and indeed CO2 change during the ice ages are big changes in the ocean's circulation. So we might think of one of the most famous examples of a big current system is the one in the North Atlantic Ocean, we've got the gulf stream which brings tropical water from the Caribbean all the way up to the shores of Scotland, and means that the climate of Scotland today is much milder than the climate of Alaska despite being at a fairly similar latitude. And that's because the Atlantic has this conveyor belt type circulation that brings this warm water north. But today the pacific doesn't have a circulation system like that, and we wanted to investigate, how did the ocean circulation look during the last ice age? And we found, really to our surprise, that during the last ice age the Pacific had one of these conveyor belt type circulations a bit like the modern day Atlantic, and there's a number of cool things about this. I think the really unexpected thing was we realized that, oh my goodness, we can reconstruct the temperature of the north Pacific during the ice age, and it was actually warmer than it was today, despite the fact that the world has plunged into this ice age, because this current system is kicked off you get this warmer-than-present-day temperature.And the neat thing about a really kind of random research connection is that we realized that there was this longstanding debate in the archaeological and anthropological literature about the first settlers in North America, the first human settlers in North America, so how did the Native Americans get to North America. Broadly speaking, people all started out in Africa and moved up through Asia, and you can see that, if you look at the genetics, there is similarity in the genetics of Native American people to Asian people until about 25,000 years ago. But then there's a kind of separation if you look at the genetic coding, and you can see that there was no longer much mixing of the original Asian populations with the founding population of the original North Americans for about, you know, 5,000 to 10,000 years, and yet there's no evidence at that time that they were in America itself. So the question is, where were they, if they're no longer intermixing with their Asian ancestors but they're not yet in North America--because it would have been really hard to get to North America given the huge ice sheets covering the rockies--where were they?And so this has led to this interesting idea of the Beringian Standstill, which is that where the Bering Strait now is between Alaska and Siberia, sea level during the last ice age was actually so low that that was land. And so the idea is that people got up into this bit of land in Beringia and they hung out there for five or eight thousand years. The question has always been, what on Earth would you be doing up there during the last ice age, right? Alaska and Siberia, not habitable climates today, and your assumption would be that these would be even more harsh in the peak of the last ice age, and yet there's always been this interesting evidence that based on pollen data the climate in that region looked surprisingly mild. And the research connection that we made was that actually we think we can explain that mild climate that allowed those early human populations to inhabit Beringia for thousands of years due to the presence of this enhanced circulation system, which meant that rather than Beringia having a climate like a more harsh version of modern day Alaska, it would have looked a bit more like Scotland. And, you know, while some would argue that Scotland is perhaps barely habitable today, it's at least a very different climate system compared to Alaska.Katherine BowersThat's so interesting.James RaeI was just fascinated to stumble across this. I think it shows the value of just trying to keep a bit of a track on the literature. It was spotting a paper that came out on the genetics of ancestral North Americans, and the link to the Beringia Standstill hypothesis. This came out and in Science just at the time that I was thinking about these data from the North Pacific, and I went, wow, I wonder if I've got an explanation for that? And I tried to read up in the literature, but I'm not an archaeologist or an anthropologist by any stretch, so I wasn't that sure about this idea. Would it really hold water? What would that community think of this? And I just happened, at a conference the next summer, to sit next to, at lunch, an anthropologist who studies this exact question. And I was like, oh hey, by the way, I've got an idea about this, what do you think? And he was into it and came on board the paper to help add some expertise on this topic.Katherine BowersSo how does your work help us think about the climate emergency?James RaeI think the key way that our work helps us think about the climate emergency is giving this quite tangible picture of what our planet looks like under elevated CO2 levels. So I've talked about using these boron measurements to find out what time our planet last had a CO2 level as high as 420ppm, and the answer to that is it's about three million years ago, it's a time called the mid-pliocene warm period. And despite the fact that planet Earth looks at first order fairly similar today--the continents are in the same places, it's prior to the evolution of the human genus but it's a world dominated by mammals--but the one key difference is that CO2 is higher, and as a result there is very little ice on Greenland and there's very little ice on west Antarctica, indeed there's a forest of beech trees on the Antarctic peninsula. And as a result of that ice melt, sea level globally is at least ten meters higher than it was today, and ten meters is comfortably enough to flood all of our major coastal cities.And so this shows us I think in quite a tangible way, this doesn't rely on computer modeling, this is just a way that our planet looks when CO2 was this high, the last time in Earth's history. This is our direction of travel. We are not there yet because it takes the climate system time to catch up with elevated CO2 levels, but if we allow CO2 to persist at this elevated level, we risk heading back to the pliocene with that huge loss of ice sheets and that huge rise in sea level. So this really I hope motivates us to make sure that doesn't happen. We do have a window of time to make sure that happened. We have to put less CO2 in the atmosphere. We probably, also, have to actively take CO2 back out of the atmosphere. If we do that quick enough, there is a window to try and avoid that catastrophic melting of mass ice sheets.Katherine BowersWell, reassuring that there is some window at least because in many news reports, it seems like that that window is, I mean I know it's small, but it seems like it's shrinking rapidly.James RaeI mean there's a variety of different windows. I think an important point actually is that there's no one window which when it closes all is lost. Climate change is a steep slope that we tumble down, I don't think it's a cliff edge that we fall off. You know, 1.5° would be great, 1.6 though would be better than 1.7 and 1.7 would be better than 1.8. There is the sliding scale of impacts. Hey if we get to 2.2° there will be a whole bunch of really serious impacts, I mean we are seeing those climate impacts today at 1.2°, 1.3°, we will see more and more of them. But my goodness they will be less extreme and less severe than the climate impacts at 3° of warming. So there's always a window to make things better. The best time to reduce emissions was yesterday, but failing that, today and tomorrow.Katherine BowersWhat can earth science as a discipline contribute to the discourse around climate change today?James RaeEarth science is right at the core of climate change research. The physical science basis of the IPCC reports, this is done by earth scientists. And I think that that's a link that isn't always well understood by the public actually, that the public kind of knows about climate change, might know about the IPCC reports, you know, the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, but has this feel for this is done by climate scientists. But who are climate scientists, where do they sit? If you want to be a climate scientist, what do you study at university? And the answer typically is earth sciences or earth and environmental sciences. And so within our school we have people looking at, how will the monsoon system evolve in the future? Or what's predicted to happen to heat waves and floods? Or if a massive volcano goes off, what will that do to Earth's climate? Or how is CO2 taken up by the ocean and what impacts does that have on marine life? So we're understanding the problem from a whole range of different angles.Earth sciences is also going to be a huge part of the solution, and there's two flavors to that. The first is we need to decarbonize our energy system. That is the most important single thing to do to fix climate change. And that's going to involve digging, no more coal and oil and gas out the ground, but we will need to dig out lithium and niobium and neodemium and cobalt and all of these weird and wonderful metals that we need for green energy technologies. So that raw material requirement to decarbonize the energy system, that's a huge contribution that earth scientists, geologists in particular, will make to fixing climate change.And then the other one is, we are a field where we have the expertise to understand, what does our planet do with elevated CO2? CO2 has gone up in the atmosphere before due to big volcanoes going off, due to the release of methane from methane gas hydrates. It's never done this as quickly as it's happening now, but CO2 has gone up before and then it's come back down again, and it comes back down because it goes into trees and plants, it dissolves into the ocean, and then it reacts with rocks, both rocks on the seafloor and rocks around us on the continents. And so earth scientists are now looking at each of those processes and thinking, are there any of these that we can speed up? This is difficult stuff. There's difficult important ethical questions to ask around this. But they're important ones to think about. In all of the scenarios that the IPCC has that get us to 1.5°C or even 2°C there's a lot of this carbon dioxide removal going on. And earth scientists are the people who are grappling with how we might be able to do that.Katherine BowersThank you so much for speaking with me today. If the people want to find you, where can they find you and your work?James RaeLook me up, I'm on social media under "Mud Water Climates" because those are things that I do, and of course you can Google me, James Rae, I'm working at the University of St Andrews, I'm easy enough to find online.Katherine BowersThinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 2 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. Althea Davies is a paleoecologist and Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her research considers long-term human-environmental interactions, including the effects of prehistoric climate change on land use in the Scottish Highlands.Welcome to the thinking climate change podcast today. Could you please tell us a little about your current research project?Althea DaviesAt the moment, I'm looking into the role of large herbivores in ecosystem dynamics, especially their relationship with woodland survival and regeneration here in the Scottish Highlands. And I know it's a topic that probably prompts a few more questions than it gives answers, so maybe I'll explain a bit more about why that interests me and how it relates to the theme of your podcast.There's been lots of scientific attention, and it's got sort of popular media attention as well, on megafaunal extinction. This is the global extinction of really large animals, often with a weight over a thousand kilograms, across multiple continents, that's happened within largely the last 50,000 years, but some as recent as about 700 years ago, if we go to places like New Zealand where European colonization is much more recent.There's been a lot of interest on what effect does the extinction of these large herbivores have on ecosystem functions--things like nutrient cycling, seed dispersal --because these animals are all considered to be ecosystem engineers. Most of this attention has been given to the megafauna, and rather less to thinking about the surviving herbivores that we still share our landscapes with, and particularly how they influence our landscapes over the really long time scales that it takes for woodlands to form and for climate change to occur. So, for instance, lots of the debate around grazing animals these days tends to focus on very recent experience. So things like, there may be places that there are too many animals, and it's considered damaging, and that's certainly the case in parts of Scotland, where red deer numbers are considered to be too high. But there are also places across the world where there are thought to be too few of these herbivores, and they've been undergoing really worrying declines. For instance, in parts of Eurasia that applies to the saiga antelopes, but also it could be applied to elephants in parts of Africa. So we know a lot more about the distant past and these megaherbivores and very recent concerns, but a lot less about what happens in between.Katherine BowersThat's interesting. And could I just ask you to clarify when you talk about large herbivores, what is an example of one of those?Althea DaviesThe one that I've been focused most on is red deer, so that's the largest surviving living land mammal here in the UK.Katherine BowersWhat kinds of questions are you asking, and how do you go about finding answers for them?Althea DaviesI think one of the reasons why the topic has drawn me in is because, until relatively recently, the methods that we've got have been inadequate for answering questions about whether these much smaller, but still in a modern context large, herbivores, are they also ecosystem engineers? We think they are, but how they interact with changes in woodland cover over thousands of years, we don't really know, especially in, what can we say has happened because of large herbivores, and what can we say has happened because of climate, and how do they interact? We really don't know some of those answers, and some of our methods haven't been too great for working that out.So, for instance, for me, my main discipline is paleoecology, which really just means long term ecology, but looking beyond the things that we can see, we can observe and record in landscapes. So it's using indicators that survive in often what are called natural archives, so in peat deposits or lake mud. I guess people may be more familiar with hearing about the records that we can get about climate in ice cores. And it's similar principles, that you have these microscopic biological or chemical signals that are preserved in a sediment, a soil, or an ice record that that builds up over time. So to understand animals, we have mostly used pollen. So lots of flowering plants produce pollen that's needed to produce seeds, but lots of that pollen drifts through the atmosphere, and some of it settles out on peat bogs or lake sediments, or even ice as well, and we can recover that because it preserves really well. And that has been used to reconstruct changes in vegetation and land cover, but also to understand when there was more disturbance in the ecosystem which we would then think of relating to animals as part of the disturbance regime.But obviously pollen isn't telling us directly about the animals. It's an indirect signal, and it gets a bit, maybe a circular argument, cause we're trying to use pollen to reconstruct the vegetation as well as to detect disturbance, and try and say something about what was causing that disturbance. Obviously, it would be great if we had access to lots of animal bones to tell us how animal populations have changed in the past, but in many parts of the world, especially in the Scottish Highlands, where the soils are acidic, bone doesn't preserve very well. So that gives us small snapshots, but not a really long-term record.So we're now able to use a few different methods. One of those is fungal spores, because, believe it or not, there are fungi that actually need dung to complete their life cycle, so they are dependent on animal dung. And their spores are of similar microscopic size to pollen grains, and they also drift through the environment and land in these natural archives, so we can use them to say there was changes in the amount of dung in the landscape which then tells us something about the animals that were producing the dung. So that comes from paleoecology, and it's also been used to detect the megafaunal extinctions.But then we can also use methods that have been developed in archaeology and archaeological science. So there's a class of chemical compounds called biomarkers, and they come in many different formats. Some of them tell us about climate, but there are also some that tell us about feces. So back to the dung, there are fecal biomarkers that we can use to say something about animals. And the benefit of the biomarkers is that archaeologists have worked to establish that some of the biomarker compounds can actually help us differentiate between the different types of animals that were present in past landscapes, which is something that neither the pollen nor the fungal spores can do. So we've got a really great opportunity to use what we could call multiple proxies, and proxies are indirect measures, to try and reconstruct how animal populations have changed, and then relate that to other forms of evidence that will tell us about climate. So we can start having a better picture of how these things relate to each other on timescales of thousands of years.Katherine BowersIt's amazing to me how you can use parts of the natural world around us today to reconstruct what existed thousands of years ago, or hundreds of years ago, and then how that can tell us things about the present. Would you say that it's possible to use the past in this way to tell us about the future?Althea DaviesYes, but it's a bit trickier. So my work is focused more on the past, especially the recent past. I've worked with historians as well, because there are really great agricultural census data sets that tell us about animal change over a very recent past that we can start to layer up with these longer datasets. I don't use models to predict the future, which you can do using these long term past datasets. I think of it more as thinking, what effect does changes in grazing levels, what effect do they have on biodiversity, for instance? And if we want to restore biodiversity in certain landscapes, like parts of the Scottish Highlands, then we can say something about the levels of grazing that we need to help us achieve those future goals. So I tend to use it more as a heuristic guide to help us achieve what we'd want to do in the future, rather than trying to predict from the past through to the future.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?Althea DaviesI guess there were two things, really. When I moved up to Scotland to do my PhD, it was based in a valley in the North-West Scottish Highlands, and it was a very new environment and unfamiliar to me, and when I first went there I thought it was very bleak and quite depressing. But as I did my PhD research, I really learnt about the subtle beauty of the landscape, and I really wanted to know how people who used to live there, what did they think of their landscape? There's lots of writing, poetry. This is a marginal landscape. But I wanted to know, did the people who lived there in prehistory, in the recent past, did they think of themselves in that way? And we tend to think that animals played a really important part in their life, in their sense of place, their livelihoods, because the soils are not suitable for lots of cultivation, so animals are really their main form of wealth, to help them survive, and as the basis for their livelihoods.So the more I learned about that, and learned about the archeology, sort of drew me into wanting to understand the landscape better, and that led into not just doing paleoecology. I started learning how to do social science and doing interviews with people who are working and living in these landscapes now and managing them. So it's the people who live there and manage these future goals of what they want to preserve and manage for the future. And so I did quite a few years work on woodland restoration, but also particularly some of the tensions around deer management, because deer don't belong to anyone. So they're a common pool resource, if you like. And lots of landscapes across the Scottish Highlands, not all properties have fences to delimit them. So the deer wander between different people's properties, and so different landowners want different things from the deer. Someone might want higher levels because they have interest in shooting deer for sport or protection for the wild venison. And there are people who want fewer deer, particularly where they want woodland regeneration to be more successful. So I worked with deer managers and other researchers to try and work out how we could find common ground.It's that mixture of knowing about the deeper history of the landscape and the people who've made their living there, and some of the complexities of people trying to still live there and work out how to live without coming into conflict with all of their neighbors, that have really drawn me to want to know more about, what is a natural baseline when we think about the Highlands? What would a more natural population of deer look like? So it's really those things that drew me to want to know more and combine paleoecology with archeology, and where I can to try and do some of this work with current land managers.Katherine BowersWhat is an unexpected connection that you have made in your work? I know that there must be some, especially working across disciplines the way you do, because often true interdisciplinarity creates these very vibrant connections that sometimes surprises in many ways. I wonder if you've come across anything like that in your work?Althea DaviesIt's a tough question to answer, because I guess it's more about me learning about the other disciplines and the sorts of stories that they can tell, especially when and why some of the landowners started getting more concerned about boundaries in their landscape rather than shared resources. So I've learnt a huge amount, especially from working with historians, about that. So for me, I guess my unexpected connection is more about doing interdisciplinary research, I think, and the joys and the complexities of learning to work with other people, and the joy of finding people with a similar mindset to you who have that curiosity, where we want to find out things that neither of our disciplines on their own can answer.So one of the findings deepened some of the ideas that I already had around the landscape, but it also filled them out by giving details that I couldn't produce from paleoecology. So, working with historians, I learnt that about the structure of farming communities before the Industrial Revolution and how diverse they were. They were made up not just of one family, but might have been multiple communities, townships they were sometimes called, and their pattern across the landscape involved not giant fields, the sort of big fields that we're used to now, but a patchwork that really meant that they supported quite a lot of biodiversity, because they had a real variety of land uses and areas of different disturbance and nutrient enrichment. And once we get into the Industrial Revolution, lots of these townships were replaced by extensive sheep farms, or in some cases deer forest, so where forest actually means areas for deer rather than necessarily lots of trees. And so by bringing the paleoecology together with the history, we really had this much better understanding of how important it is to think about landscape mosaics if we want to maintain or restore biodiversity, and the importance of grazing as a factor within that.Katherine BowersHow does your work help us think about the climate emergency?Althea DaviesI don't think my work directly addresses it. I think a long term perspective has its limits with dealing with current issues, because obviously the factors that have led to the current situation are often so different, or there was an accumulation of so many things, that the situation that we haven't directly faced in the past. But I think they can help us think very carefully about change, recognize that many of the things that we worry about are invisible because they take place over long timescales. Lots of processes and ecosystems, they don't necessarily respond immediately, they might respond slowly, so we have a lagged response. So it's trying to put that awareness and warning signals in when we think about the climate emergency, and that not every change will be something that we can see immediately.Katherine BowersWhat can paleoecology as a discipline contribute to the discourse around climate change today?Althea DaviesI think maybe there are three things that they can contribute, or at least from my areas of interest.The first of those is to think about a world being transformed. We're so used to familiar landscapes--when I say "us" I think I mean Western society, when we're quite insulated from many of the more extreme aspects of current climate change--I think it's us as the major consumers that need to be much more aware of how much change is going to come our way, and I think the past can help tell us stories about how much change has happened, and think much more about the sort of rippling consequences, the cascades of factors that are coming our way, and use stories in ways that are not purely about entertainment or thinking about crisis, but really thinking carefully about how climate change is going to affect the things that we value.And I think that means the second area where I think paleoecology contributes is that it gives us a reality check, it helps us recognize that we can't turn the clock back and simply put back ecosystems that used to exist. But it can help us give a better understanding of all the things over multiple timescales that have shaped the world as it is now, the things that we value as well, and but also help us think about, when can we resist change? Because sometimes there are things, ecosystems or communities, that we think maybe have a very high cultural value, for instance a national park, or a very high conservation value. And I think, seeing how much change is the normality over long time scales, can maybe help us think more carefully about how much we can resist change, and when we really need to make some tough choices, and accept that we will lose some of the things that we would prefer to preserve. So I think it's a bit of an ecological reality check that we sometimes need to help us be pushed to make decisions about. We have limited finance to restore lots of ecosystems, so we will need to make tough choices.And then the final one, I think, is a bit more positive, and that's thinking about the relationships between people and nature, and learning from examples of when they actually support one another. It's not all about doom and gloom. So thinking about, for instance, going back to one of my favorite ecosystems, woodlands, there are woodlands where we know that people have managed them over very long time scales. So the beeches that might look natural to us now are really the product of long cultural interaction. And so that gives us a signal that if there are values there, and often biodiversity values, we need people to be involved and work with these habitats and invest in active management to maintain biocultural diversity. I think that is a more positive way of seeing the relationships between people and nature.Katherine BowersThank you so much for sharing your work today. It has been a pleasure to speak to you and to learn more about the research that you have been doing. If the audience is interested in learning more about your work, where can they find you?Althea DaviesI don't have a personal web page, so the best places to go are my university page, if you just search for my name at the University of St Andrews, or look on Researchgate, where I put details of the publications and projects as well.Katherine BowersThank you again.Thinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 3 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. Stephanie O'Rourke is an art historian and Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her current research project examines the way the European visual artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depicted landscapes and, through them, the changing attitudes about the natural world.Welcome to the podcast. To begin could you please tell us a little about your current research project.Stephanie O'RourkeWell first of all, thanks so much for having me be part of this conversation with you.So I'm an art historian. I'm mainly thinking about visual material of the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth century in Western Europe and some of its colonial networks. I've recently been working on a book about the relationship between landscape and extraction, resource extracting industries such as timber harvesting, which was really important in that moment, as well as ore mining, coal mining, things like that. One of the larger aims here is to think about how a kind of depletion-based way of relating to the natural world was visualized in this period, because this is really the emergence of industrial modernity in Europe. I mean it's a bit earlier than the existing histories we have, so for instance, I'm wondering about how certain ways of picturing the natural environment enable an extractive way of understanding it, but also trying to query whether there were forms of picturing the natural environment that introduced friction into the protocols of extraction, in the moment that extraction is being consolidated and becoming increasingly important to how Western European economies are being run.Katherine BowersSo you've already talked a little bit about this in your first answer, but I'm wondering, what are some of the questions that you're asking, some of perhaps the bigger questions that your project asks, and how do you go about finding answers for them?Stephanie O'RourkeThat's a very good question. Maybe not as straightforward to answer as I might wish. I would say on a concrete level one of the questions that my project tries to raise is to look anew at what is being pictured in landscape paintings, but not just landscape paintings. There are things that we now understand as part of industrial extraction, for instance around timber management, but also illicit activities that worked around the margins of timber management and that were legislated against to protect the timber industry, such as gathering for sticks and things like that, these illegal uses of the woods. We've got these seemingly very bucolic paintings of peasants in woods and now we can look at them and understand this is a contested space. These peasants were engaging in activities that were being outlawed through national efforts to protect the interests of the timber industry. So that would be an example of what is being represented and thinking anew about that. Or in another portion of this project I look at mining, some of these mountains that were being portrayed were understood as sites of mining. In fact, mining powered entire regional economies in for instance parts of southern and eastern Germany. So we talk about these mining landscapes as if they're about the sublime, and I'm suggesting that they're instead about what's beneath the surface of the mountain, they're actually about mining as a new way of relating to that environment.So with what is being shown, those are two examples. And I think another question that I try to raise in this project is how is something being shown? For this I'm interested in looking at visual material that exceeds what we traditionally define as a landscape. That's one of the hows of how I'm uncovering this. With my work on German mountain communities I'm also looking at the diagrams that are printed in these early mineralogical texts, and so for instance, what I'm asking is, how is this natural environment being shown in a way that enables people to think of it in extractive terms? I would be looking at the way that it flattens this really complex terrain into something both flat and seemingly very simple, when you impose a scale or numerical grid onto something this implies a landscape, a terrain that can be kind of rationalized, optimized, managed. These are some of the protocols of extractive capitalism that will be brought to bear on those physical environments.And likewise there are related questions about whether sight itself, whether vision can be extractive, specifically in the sense of recognizing looking at a physical environment and visualizing something in a way that imagines how easy it would be to sort of pluck it out and set it into circulation as a commodity. So I think there are ways of picturing that encourage the viewer to see a specific feature as extractable, and likewise there are ways of picturing that require the viewer to take a long time, and it's difficult to sort of disaggregate different features of the natural world in a landscape, and so I'm querying, is that a way of picturing, a way of viewing, that thwarts the market imperatives of extraction?Katherine BowersDo you find that some of the artists that you're looking at when they're painting these, or when they're depicting things like for example the peasants that are engaged in illegal activities on land, is the depiction of those politicized, or is this simply artists working towards a specific kind of aesthetic of the peasant on the land without that political lens?Stephanie O'RourkeThat's a good question. I think it's very difficult to say because there are also larger questions about who pictures are for. So for instance, would an aristocratic patron find it non-threatening and delightful even to see this traditional practice being commemorated even at the very moment that they know it's coming under threat? There were some artists that we know were appealing for the preservation of for instance historical woodlands long before the environmentalism movement, and so that's a particularly rich example where you can say, this is the way they're picturing the woodlands and here are the letters that they wrote to Napoleon III asking for those woodlands to be protected. And so we feel comfortable saying there is this sort of proto-ecological activism that is the politics of this image. But interestingly, with the German Romantics in particular, quite a few of them were mining administrators or were somehow engaged in the mining economy. So Goethe was employed as a mining administrator, Novalis. So even though we understand these thinkers to be embracing a kind of natural philosophy which sees complete oneness between the self and the natural world, they were also descending into mines and drafting up charts for how to optimize the extraction of these metal ores, and they're overseeing mining structures, so it's not always obvious from first glance, what the politics of one of these artworks is going to be.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?Stephanie O'RourkeI think like you I'm wondering about what kinds of historical methods and also historical insights can be mobilized in the present day, and at least in the case of art history, we've talked a long time about industrialization. There's no surprise that that's one of the major shifts that's happening in nineteenth century Europe, but it's difficult to be more precise about what the mechanisms of that were. And I think especially industrialization, it tends to draw your focus to what humans are doing in relation to things like built infrastructure, what they're doing in relation to technologies. It's certainly a really important place to think about what's happening with class and labor. But today obviously one of the pressing concerns we have is, whether it's going to be possible to shift the way that humans relate to the natural world, and so I wanted to frame a historical question that focused on how such a relationship came to be installed in European visual culture in the first place. Maybe to kind of excavate what the early history of that was, so that's why I tried to focus instead on extraction, not just extraction but kind of a use-based way of relating to the natural world.Katherine BowersSo what is an unexpected connection that you have made in your work? Do you find that the things that you've found as you've researched more into this are what you expected to find, or do you find that there are some connections or some resonances that you perhaps would not have anticipated when you started this project?Stephanie O'RourkeOne of the broader trends in environmental history, literature, and in art history is ecocriticism, which often entails recovering an ecological vantage point in a historical artwork. So something that prioritizes the interconnectedness and interdependency and biodiversity of a given environment. We assume that artworks that enshrine those characteristics therefore also have a kind of ideological opposition to subordinating the natural world to economic imperatives, and that's not what I was trying to do. I was trying to inhabit a more historical vantage point. But the problem is that obviously I'm doing so from the present day which is animated by these extremely specific concerns.There was something that came up when I was researching timber management in France and in colonial Algeria that really struck me, both in the way that it differed from the present day and then in this unexpected way that it anticipated the present day. So I was looking at these mid-nineteenth century French landscapes of forests, and the main ways that we have to understand these are firstly that they're part of a broader trend of naturalism, getting closer to nature, depicting nature with greater particularity, more emphasis on transient atmospheric conditions, the sense of, this is what this specific place looked like at this moment under these conditions, and the idea that you could have some sort of intimacy to that landscape. Also in a related way, at least one of the artists was involved in advocating for the preservation of some historic woodlands, so we do know that he did have these concerns.But when I was researching it I found that not just this one artist but quite a few artists at the time were not just painting these woodlands but they were painting a lot of flood scenes, and that's because in the first half of the nineteenth century France came to understand itself as a country that was really plagued by damaging flooding, and they specifically believed that the flooding was the result of deforestation. So this is a country that, there was quite devastating flooding in the 1820s, 30s and 40s, so when I was looking at a flood scene from the 1850s I came to understand that even 150 years ago the French were saying a certain extraction industry has been operating without constraints and it has destabilized our climate in ways that are threatening our agriculture, our way of life, etc. And I hadn't expected to find that, and what I encountered when I looked into it was actually that people wrote extensively about the notion that the climate of territorial France was extremely dependent on what was happening in colonial Algeria at the time. There was a lot of debate about the Sahara Desert potentially expanding if they were allowed to cut down trees in the wrong places and then the desert sands were going to blow through Algeria and threaten France's colonial possession of it. On the other hand it was extensively theorized by some scientists that the warm air over the Sahara blew northward and hovered over France, and so the idea was that France had this temperate climate for how far north it was because of the forest management that they were undertaking in colonial Algeria. So there is this colonial climate project going on. What also surprised me about it was that a there was a very refined understanding in this moment of landscapes being connected across vast distances. When I'm looking at a French painting of an Algerian forest, I understand that the viewers in the Paris salon, they understand the climatological space of Paris and of the scene of this French Algerian forest as being interconnected. And that really surprised me.Katherine BowersAnd that's a level of interconnectivity that's not apparent at first viewing, right? You might see the colonial aspect of that of that painting but not necessarily the fact that those Parisian viewers would feel the reality of the warmth of the painting as part of their climateological experience.Stephanie O'RourkeI think that's exactly right. I think that's really beautifully put.Katherine BowersSo how does your work help us think about the climate emergency that we are experiencing today?Stephanie O'RourkeIn my research I tried to be realistic and practical. I haven't found it especially useful or especially possible to follow the calls of certain ecocritical activists about, you know, embracing radical solidarity with our gut biome. Even though that sounds great. I think what I'm trying to to focus on in the research is a very workmanlike understanding of the fact that images, like narratives, are tools that we use to manage our relationship to our environment, how we understand that relationship. And I do think it's possible to better appreciate how certain ways of literally perceiving it encourage us or enable us to see ourselves as completely separate from it, and able to sort of get things out of it willy-nilly. I also think it's useful to look at historical images that don't enable that and to query, you know, what would it look like in the present day to picture the natural world in a way that doesn't enable us to have this sort of extractive fantasy about it. Ultimately though I don't think I've recovered amazing strategies of resistance in the nineteenth century archive, but I do think it's possible to take more seriously the idea that images can enable or can disable extractive ways of understanding the natural world and they have done that in the past and I think they do do that now.Katherine BowersSo what can art history as a discipline contribute to the discourse around climate change today?Stephanie O'RourkeI think that this is a question many humanistic disciplines are asking themselves, especially with renewed urgency as things like funding structures are changing, and art history, one of the many things it has going for it is that there is a sensory immediacy to an encounter with an artwork that can cut through a lot of cultural noise and that can also cut through some of the cultural hierarchies by which people feel estranged from certain experiences and certain cultural products. So I think that there's a lot of scope for contemporary artists to intervene with how we relate to our environment, how we understand our place in the history of it, and I think art history can also do a lot to excavate the aesthetic and maybe some of the affective dimensionalities of how we've come to internalize an extractive way of relating to the natural world, and at the very least a better understanding of that is going to make it seem less naturalized, less sort of inevitable, maybe a bit less hegemonic. And I think beyond that the question is very much up for debate. But I see an enormous kind of creativity that's emerging in art history as people are challenging themselves with that question.Katherine BowersWell thank you for speaking with me today. This has been a really interesting conversation about the possibilities that art history and that your work in particular looking at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape depiction holds for thinking through climate change. I'm wondering, if our listeners are interested in finding your work, where can they find it?Stephanie O'RourkeWell they could they could Google my name. And I have an academic web page and I've also got a personal website that has versions of my scholarship that aren't behind paywalls. And on that website they'll also find a link to a podcast that I did about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geology, which I think is not thinking about climate in the way that your project is but might have some interesting other stories along the way that people could check out.Katherine BowersEnlightenment Rocks? Stephanie O'RourkeThat's right, Enlightenment Rocks!Katherine BowersFantastic.Stephanie O'RourkeGreat. Well thank you so much for and having me on to talk about this and I really look forward to seeing what you do with the rest of the project.Katherine BowersIt's been a pleasure.Thinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 4 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. Andrea Burke is a geochemist, paleoclimatologist, and Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the forcings and mechanisms of natural climate and carbon cycle change through geochemical records of past climatic events.So hello, thank you so much for talking to me today. Could you please tell us a little about your current research project?Andrea BurkeI'm currently really interested in using the past history of large volcanic eruptions as sort of a set of natural experiments with our climate systems. So volcanic eruptions, when they erupt they emit sulfur dioxide gas, and that sulfur dioxide gets oxidized into sulfate aerosols, which are tiny little particles that act to reflect incoming solar radiation or sunlight. And this acts to cool the planet. So for instance, in 1991 there was the Pinatubo eruption, and that led to a global cooling of our planet by 0.6°C, which is quite substantial. And this is a short-term cooling, it lasted for about 3 years. So these volcanic eruptions provide a natural experiment of our climate system where you have a forcing on the climate, the volcanic aerosols, and then you can look at the climate response. And so this allows us to tell something about climate sensitivity and how sensitive our climate is to these external forces, and it also allows us to look at what feedbacks in the climate system are important. And so what I've been doing is looking at ice core records of volcanic sulfate, and using isotopes to fingerprint them and tell us something about how much sulfur made it up into the upper levels of the atmosphere, and thus stuck around for a long time and had a big climate impact, and using that to try and get at the sort of climate sensitivity of our planet. And the nice thing about the volcanic eruptions is that we have hundreds of them in the past that we can look at.Katherine BowersSo what kind of questions are you asking, and how do you go about finding answers for them?Andrea BurkeThe main approach I'm using is looking at sulfur isotopes in ice cores. An isotope is an atom of an element that has a different number of neutrons. So for instance in sulfur, you've got sulfur-32 which is made up of 16 protons and 16 neutrons. You can measure the ratio of these isotopes and that can tell you about the pathway that the sulfate aerosol traveled and a bit of information about the residence time, how long that sulfate molecule stayed in the atmosphere. And that allows us to say, well how much radiative forcing did that volcanic eruption have? And so that's the method I'm using, and the question that we're tackling with that is, well what is the climate response to these volcanic eruptions? And this has implications for how climate will respond to other forcing such as greenhouse gases, which goes in the opposite direction, the greenhouse gases act to warm, but the feedbacks that operate on the planet are the same. So that's really the motivation for this work.Katherine BowersSo how do you get the material that that you are looking at?Andrea BurkeThere's lots of ice cores that have been drilled both in Greenland and in Antarctica, which are the main places I get them from. When they get drilled they have initial samples run and then they've got an archive piece that remains in an ice core repository. So dotted around the world there are these large freezers that store these ice cores that have been drilled over the last several decades. So you can put in a sample request to either the scientists who drilled them or more generally to the core repository that they're housed in, and you can access the samples. All these ice cores tend to have very high resolution measurements of sulfate, so you can then figure out the depths that you need to sample to get a specific volcanic peak in sulfate. So you get to spend a couple of chilly days in a freezer cutting ice, and then conveniently, the first step in the process is that you melt the ice, for my measurements, and so you don't have to keep them frozen, so we can then just ship them back to the lab as melted ice samples, essentially.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?Andrea BurkeThat's an interesting question. I've always dabbled in a lot of different geochemical techniques. I'm very motivated by trying to understand past climate change. I think one of the real beauties is that it provides so much extra data to put our current climate change into context. And geochemistry, and in particular isotope geochemistry which is the type of geochemistry I do, is really useful for trying to decode what past climate change looked like. So that's really been my motivating interest over the course of my career.But in particular this project I loved. I got into it because when I started my postdoc I wanted to learn a new technique, and I did a postdoc at Caltech, so my PhD was looking at changes in ocean circulation, transitioning from the last glacial maximum, the ice age 20,000 years ago, to today, and how changes in ocean circulation led to the change in atmospheric CO2 that occurred over that time. So I did a lot of uranium series isotopes, I did radiocarbon, things like that. And when I started my postdoc I thought, oh I'd quite like to learn a new technique, and at Caltech Jess Adkins had just started setting up a new way of measuring sulfur isotopes which I found quite exciting. I was initially intrigued by just the new method and the opportunities it opened. And the real beauty of this new method of measuring sulfur isotopes by a multicollector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer is that you need very little sample. You need very little sulfur to make a measurement. And I did something that's maybe a little less paleoclimaty but still quite relevant for climate, which was looking at weathering in rivers. So I looked at a global budget of how much pyrite oxidation we have in rivers, because it has implications for whether or not weathering on land takes up CO2, so it acts as a sink for CO2, or whether it actually acts as a source of CO2. And it was really unconstrained when I started my postdoc, and so I did a lot of that, and that was my main postdoc project.Towards the end of my time at Caltech I got put in touch with ice core scientist Joe McConnell at the desert research institute in Reno, Nevada, who had some interesting ice core samples that he was keen to have sulfur ice strips measured on, and because they were so low in sulfur they needed this new method that we were using at Caltech. That was right at the end of my postdoc. Then when I moved to St Andrews in 2014 I spent most of my time setting up the method here and perfecting it--well not perfecting, it's never perfect, but improving it and applying it to a whole bunch of interesting eruptions over the last two thousand years.Katherine BowersSo what is an unexpected connection that you have made in your work.Andrea BurkeOne thing that I've found, I just had a paper out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS, that shows that the temperature response, which is reconstructed by tree rings--the northern hemisphere summer temperature response to volcanic eruptions that are in the high latitudes, so the extratropics--it's about seven times cooler response to the same loading of sulfur from a tropical eruption. And that really goes against what people typically assume in terms of which eruptions are going to have the largest impact on climate.Part of the story is that the tree rings are really recording northern hemisphere temperatures and the eruptions are in the northern hemisphere, and so you're concentrating that sulfur aerosol load in the hemisphere. So you get a little bit more bang for your buck for your sulfur. But it can't be the whole thing, so that really points to a very strong response of feedbacks in the northern hemisphere, a climate feedback such as sea ice feedback which is a positive feedback. So you cool after an eruption, and that cooling of the surface ocean for instance in the Arctic and the North Atlantic leads the growth of sea ice, and then that sea ice is white, so it reflects more incoming sunlight, and so that gives you more cooling, so then you can grow more sea ice. So this amplifying feedback process really amplifies the temperature response to volcanic eruptions. That's been a really fun project to work on. I showed that three of the last five coldest decades in the last two thousand years, so the coldest decades in the last two thousand years, three of them are all associated with these large extratropical eruptions, and we had a very large temperature response to that. So I think that's the first paper I think which will sort of arc into lots of different interesting studies with climate models and things like that that we can do to try and understand the process.Katherine BowersIt's so interesting how many different aspects of the natural world, today's natural world, you can use to see glimpses or to understand the past and past climate change, past climate fluctuation, temperature fluctuation, right? So tree rings, ice cores, parts of the ocean, I find that fascinating.Andrea BurkeI do too. It's hooked me ever since.Katherine BowersHow does your work help us think about the climate emergency?Andrea BurkeI think my work provides some useful context. For instance that finding I just told you about really points at these really strong high latitude feedbacks, those sea ice feedbacks, and the strength of that in driving the climate system to an external forcing. And while I've been looking at coolings you can you can sort of flip it on its head and think, oh actually these warmings are going to be really important, right? So the warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions--we see reduced sea ice in the Arctic and the North Atlantic, that's going to have a positive feedback in the other way, and indeed we do see what's known as this Arctic amplification, we get really warm temperatures, much greater temperature change at the poles. So I think using these volcanic eruptions can really allow us to put our current change into context.I think as well, there are continued discussions about sulfate geoengineering. Geoengineering is a word that you might use to say, somehow engineer the Earth's system to mitigate climate change. That's what geoengineering means. And in particular sulfate stratospheric injections is the process by which you inject a bunch of sulfur into the stratosphere, the high altitudes of the atmosphere, similar to a volcanic eruption, just like that Pinatubo one in 1991, you'll get a cooling because you'll reflect more incoming solar radiation.Now it's quite controversial. It will give a cooling. That's pretty well known. But it doesn't actually fix the problem. First off, we still will have lots of CO2 in our atmosphere, and so it's like a really bad band-aid. But it would provide a short term cooling. But I think what's really interesting about this work that I'm doing with volcanoes is it's really highlighting our lack of understanding of exactly how the climate will respond to different regions, and so there's very much a different regional pattern that you can see in tree rings, there will be changes in precipitation that are difficult to predict. There's really a lot of uncertainties which add to, well let's maybe not just make our environmental problems worse by trying to engineer ourselves out of them. So I think it provides some interesting context to that debate, essentially.Katherine BowersWhat do geochemistry and paleoclimatology as disciplines contribute to the discourse around climate change today?Andrea BurkeI think in particular using geochemistry to reconstruct past climates allows us to really expand the amount of data that we have on our climate system. You know, we're currently doing one big experiment with our climate system. We are adding CO2 at quite large rates to the atmosphere and we're seeing a temperature response. That's experiment number one, and unfortunately we're in it, and it's really hard to make future projections because there's a lot of uncertainty and we only have 100 years of data, of observations or whatever.Katherine BowersAnd it's not exactly a controlled experiment.Andrea BurkeExactly, and so by expanding back, and also looking at longer term changes and things like that, we just don't have the length of the records, and so you really need to look into the past, not just to expand the data set but expand the range of climate states and climate forcings that the climate system has been exposed to. I think it provides a really useful set of observations, with their inherent uncertainties of course. But it does provide useful observations.So for instance there's this metric in climate science called equilibrium climate sensitivity, which is essentially the temperature response for doubling of CO2 once the whole earth system's in equilibrium. It's a really difficult number to get at, and that's really one of the main uncertainties in projecting future climate change. And the uncertainty on what this number is hasn't improved for decades, so it's still quite a large range, we don't really know it very well. But arguably the best improvement on the uncertainty on this number has come from a statistical approach of using both models, but also paleoclimate observations from really different climate states like the last glacial maximum, the last ice age, to try and get at that number, and this work has shown an improvement. It really highlights the benefit of saying, okay, well let's look at this Earth's climate when we're in an ice age, we know what the atmospheric CO2 was then from ice core measurements, we can reconstruct what the temperature is, that's another point in what this climate sensitivity is. And so, moving forwards, I think there's a lot more interdisciplinary work between people who study past climates and people studying the modern climate change that I think is really quite exciting, and I think it can open up very interesting new avenues of research.Katherine BowersGreat. Well thank you so much for talking with me today. Where can the people find you if they are interested in learning more about your work?Andrea BurkeProbably the best thing to do is to Google me. My website's probably out of date, but I'm Andrea Burke at St Andrews, and so you can see my recent publications and probably a slightly out-of-date website.Katherine BowersThank you.Andrea BurkeThank you.Katherine BowersThinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews. Thinking Climate Change podcast - Episode 5 - TranscriptKatherine BowersThinking Climate Change is a podcast that features interviews with researchers whose work presents interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about climate change. I’m Dr Katherine Bowers, an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews.Dr. Bridget Bradley is a social anthropologist and Lecturer at the University Of St Andrews. Her current research draws on her interest in mental health and community activism and focuses on experiences of ecoanxiety with climate activists and their families in Britain.Hello, thank you so much for joining me today. Could you please tell us a little about your current research project?Bridget BradleyThank you so much for inviting me. My current research began in 2021 and I've spent the last few years trying to develop this work further. It broadly looks at climate anxiety in Britain among so-called climate activists, generally speaking anybody who defines themselves as an activist, with a specific focus on kinship and how families are experiencing climate anxiety. The work was funded for about six months and at this point we were still in the Covid-19 lockdown in Britain, so it was an interesting project because it had to be designed around those restrictions, and so it became an online pilot study where I could begin to ask questions about climate anxiety and the mental health effects of activism in Britain with people all over the UK, from the very top of Scotland in the Orkney Islands down to the corners of England in Brighton and Cornwall. So it was practically challenging to try to build relationships with people in that way but also really helpful because we were able to access people in different places and opened up some really interesting observations about peeking into people's homes through a Zoom screen rather than being physically there with people as we would normally do in anthropological fieldwork. So I was supported by a team of three research assistants during that period who helped me to do interviews, focus groups, and some special events with climate organizations to try to find out how people are managing climate anxiety and how activism and climate anxiety go hand in hand, as well as how parents, children, grandchildren and different types of people are managing climate anxiety in the everyday.Katherine BowersSo what kind of questions are you asking and how do you go about finding answers for them?Bridget BradleySo the questions that interested me at the start of the project, and came from my PhD research, which was on a completely different topic, but was about the power of mental health labels in how people find one another and form communities to support one another through quite complex mental health issues, particularly around disorders and illnesses that are new and emerging. My interest in climate anxiety and ecoanxiety was piqued really due to the rise in public interest and media outputs on the topic, and what seemed to me as a brand new pathological label in the making. So I was interested in how people were defining ecoanxiety for themselves, whether they resonated with that label, if they felt that label represented their lived experiences, and how people were coming together around that new label and whether or not they were forming bonds of care or solidarity, and how they were then communicating those mental health experiences to family members in everyday experiences.And so we were interested in questions around the labeling of climate anxiety, as well as how different generations are managing the mental health effects and if there were similarities, differences, tensions, disputes happening in the home. We were interested in climate activism and the effect of climate activism on mental health and vice versa, but we were very broadly defining activism and were more interested in everyday forms of activism that might be happening at home in domestic spaces, but also in education settings with teachers, parents, and children, as well as public protests, and some of the challenges of participating in public protest for people perhaps with young children and different caring responsibilities or at different life stages. So in order to find the answers to those questions we were limited because of the online nature of the project, but we found that semi-structured interviews allowed us to pose those questions and get some detailed responses, but through the use of focus groups and some participant observation in events organized with climate organizations we were able to build on the interview questions with individuals and see how people responded in the group setting of our focus group, and also reflect on our own experiences of participating in an event like a climate cafe for example, organized by a psychology alliance that works with with climate issues. Katherine BowersSo what is a climate cafe?Bridget BradleyA climate cafe is effectively a form of support group where people go to share the emotional and psychological concerns relating to the climate crisis. It's based on the format of a death cafe, which has been growing in popularity I believe. It's a space for people to share their concerns in a safe and comfortable environment and get some support with others who are going through similar things. These are spaces I was really interested in and wanted to do participant observation in, but due to the short term timeline with the project and getting ethical approval, not being able to build trust with people over a period that justified then being in a very intimate space like that, we weren't able to get access to the groups that were already happening, the climate cafes already happening, but instead we worked with the climate psychology alliance to facilitate a group that our participants could join. And that was fascinating because we were able to participate ourselves and see how they were run and through the facilitation.Katherine BowersSo what drew you to this project?Bridget BradleyMy interest in the project came from personal experience really. I had been experiencing what I would be calling climate anxiety for several years, and it really peaked and worsened a lot after the birth of my first child. This was something I had been managing alongside completing a PhD and writing and working on mental health, and being involved in various forms of activism of my own, not just relating to the climate crisis. But I found that there was a deep sense of isolation around the particular fears that I had relating to the climate crisis, and being very out of place in my own family networks, friendship groups, and even academic circles, of feeling that my concerns and my fears were much more extreme than my peers and my colleagues. Which is surprising because I'm surrounded by a lot of very progressive and well-informed people, but there was something about the effects that I was dealing with that I felt I wasn't able to make sense of fully myself, and the importance of that happening at a time in my life with young children and trying to navigate all of the different responsibilities and challenges and work stresses in my life made me realize that it's very difficult to get involved in this form of activism to the extent that you want to, so there are a lot of overlapping emotions there of guilt and anxiety. So like any good anthropologist I kind of turned those questions into a research focus. But rather than drawing on my own personal experience in this project, there's really just been a way to think through the work. And it did give me an important way to relate to my interlocutors, to compare experiences with them, to share my experiences with them in interviews which did help to open up conversations and build some rapport in important ways.Katherine BowersWhat is an unexpected connection that you've made in your work?Bridget BradleySo there have been a few unexpected aspects of this work. The first one was that I was expecting to see much more of a network of solidarity among people who consider themselves to be suffering from climate anxiety. Instead the people we spoke to said that they found climate action and the climate movement quite exclusionary in many ways, and they didn't get a lot of support from people they were also spending time with in those activist circles, which surprised me. I thought I would see a lot more of that support network because in the psychology literature, there's a very strong argument that the answer to climate anxiety is taking part in climate action, it's framed as a solution to the mental health effects of worrying about climate change, and actually what our research showed was that that's not always the case and it's certainly not that straightforward, many people feel that they don't belong within activist circles, and so it can also make climate anxiety worse. And I think that's an important thing to bring attention to.Katherine BowersThe fact that climate activists don't necessarily feel a sense of community with other climate activists, and that that is in some ways detrimental to mental health, I wonder why you think that those bonds of community are not forming? Because you're right, you would expect that they would.Bridget BradleyI think they certainly are for many people. There were interesting gendered and class differences in our group of participants. There were a handful of men that took part and only two people who identified as working class, but the responses from those people showed that there are very strong divisions in the climate movement in Britain that make working class people in particular feel that they aren't being heard and that particular forms of action are exclusionary for them. And so I think those are well-known issues in the climate movement more broadly, but certainly one of the working class people that we spoke to, when I asked about making friends and building connections through the action he was taking part in, he said it's a bit like making friends at a funeral. There's no point. And so he was telling us in other conversations that he felt he didn't fit in when he was at meetings, because he was working class and very different to the people he was mixing with, but also his despair at the situation and in his view the fact that there is not going to be a future in the way that he imagines it or that he hoped there would be, and so there is no point in building those friendships and those relationships. It highlights how when you are really struggling with the state the world and how things are looking then it's very hard to remain hopeful enough to build those connections and to feel the benefit of them, and that can be very isolating, and again it shows the importance of looking at climate anxiety from the relational perspective, because if people are struggling to express the extent of their concerns within their families and feeling that they are alone in that, and then not even build those connections with others, then you can see how that can be very detrimental to mental health and can actually make people shut down completely.The other unexpected connection has been what has happened since, which is that I've been contacted by lots of different people and organizations from media outlets and other academics, but also artists and performers. I recently took part in a dance performance--I wasn't dancing myself, I was in the post-show discussion--but there are so many people working on these topics and doing fascinating, really creative things, and there seems to be a distinct lack of this social and cultural perspective in the UK. I know that there's a lot of psychology research coming out and emerging, but I think we need to do a lot more to build those interdisciplinary connections and also work with practitioners in the arts and different fields to communicate this work and to do research that actually represents what's happening in the UK today.Katherine BowersHow does your work help us think about the climate emergency?Bridget BradleyI think this work brings attention to the forms of activism that are happening less in the public eye. So in the everyday people are struggling to connect with the climate movement, particularly those with young children and unable to take part in traditional forms of protest. So I think we need to pay attention to the diversity in what action looks like and what an activist is. More and more we're seeing images and narratives that assume these stereotypes of what counts as a climate activist, and that's certainly shaped by the school strikes movement, the influence of Greta Thunberg, but we know that climate activism is in many ways much more diverse than that, particularly globally. By showing the different types of people involved in this movement and the different things they're doing, the really innovative and creative things that they're doing in their everyday lives, but also the challenges they're facing and keeping that work going and how hard it is to sustain it, not just physically through energy but also emotionally, and how taxing it can be for people. I think it's an important time particularly when we're seeing more and more barriers to protest in the UK through the Conservative government and the crackdown on public protest, and the overlapping Social Justice issues that often cause tensions within the UK context. So I think more and more it's important to think about how people can take part in action and to do it in ways that help them rather than hinder them and cause additional stress and burnout, which is increasingly important at a time when it's very depressing and it's hard to know what you can do, but again it's really important to maintain some hope and share stories of how people are doing things, and that it doesn't have to be all or nothing, right? Action, even if it's not visible and it's hidden, can still be meaningful and important.Katherine BowersWhat can social anthropology as a discipline contribute to the discourse around climate change today?Bridget BradleyI think social anthropology is perfectly suited to address these urgent questions because our methods are very intimate and immersive. We don't like quick answers to to complex questions. We seek out the nuance and the complexity of issues. But that can also be a challenge because, as I said, this project was a short-term pilot study that I'm now trying to develop into in-depth research to look more deeply at these issues rather than just do some interviews over a short space of time.What I like about anthropology is its ability to lean into our own subjectivities and personal experiences as things that shape our work, as opportunities for connecting with the people we meet, building relationships, and then also creating impact beyond the research moment, of connecting with communities that we want to invest in longer term, and to work with people to improve social situations and fight for political issues that we that we believe in. And so I found that a very effective way to work with communities in the past, and I think that with this issue, it's even more important to build on those relationships and actually make sure that the research we do makes a difference beyond just the written form that's expected in academia often.Katherine BowersThank you so much for talking with me today, I really appreciate it. If the people are interested in learning more about you and your work, where can they find you?Bridget BradleyThe project still has a website, which is actually beautifully decorated with some photographs that we worked with a local photographer on, so please check out the website. I'll be adding events and future talks and news items about things as items are published and that sort of thing. It's 'Eco Worrier, Eco Warrior', you can Google and find me.Katherine BowersThinking Climate Change is made possible by a grant from the British Academy with thanks to the University of St Andrews.
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