Radiolab - Smog Cloud Silver Lining

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

Summer 2023 was a pretty scary one for the planet. Global temperatures in June and July reached record highs. And over in the North Atlantic Sea, the water temperature spiked to off-the-chart levels. Some people figured that meant we were about to go over the edge, doomsday. In the face of this, Hank Green (a long time environmentalist and science educator behind SciShow, Crash Course, and more), took to social media to put things in context, to keep people focused on what we can do about climate change. In the process, he came across a couple studies that suggested a reduction in sulfurous smog from cargo ships may have accidentally warmed the waters. And while Hank saw a silver lining around those smog clouds, the story he told—about smog clouds and cooling waters and the problem of geoengineering—took us on a rollercoaster ride of hope and terror. Ultimately, we had to wrestle with the question of what we should be doing about climate change, or what we should even talk about.Special thanks to Dr. Colin Carson and Avishay Artsy. EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Lulu Millerwith help from - Alyssa Jeong PerryProduction help from - Alyssa Jeong PerryOriginal music and sound design contributed by - Jeremy Bloomwith mixing help from - Jeremy BloomFact-checking by - Natalie Middletonand Edited by  - N/A CITATIONS: Videos: Sci Show (https://www.youtube.com/@SciShow) Crash Course (https://www.youtube.com/crashcourse)   Articles: The article Hank came across (https://zpr.io/zKYxWht3Nmy7)   Books:  Under a White Sky (https://zpr.io/zKYxWht3Nmy7): The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!   Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.   Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

I've scared myself over and over and over again. I've made myself cry. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, yeah. It's so hard for me to picture you feeling afraid because you're just such a like big dude. Yo, Lulu here. But the other day I sat down with Radio Lab's director of sound design, Dillingkeef. It was late at night. I was mixing this piece on Zambi to talk to him about what he actually does on our show. Well, which was something I thought I understood. He smooths out the cuts in the dialogue. He writes pretty music.

But when he actually started explaining it to me, I realized I's an argument I had no idea. Right from dialogue editing, we are deciding, like how much humanity do we want to be presenting to people? What do you mean? Well, if someone feels particularly nervous being on the air, for example, you might want to, for the sake of the story, allow that nervousness to breathe. You might want to breathe. And the more he talked about what he was doing, the more I started to see how the choices he was making

about pacing, with timing, and the right mood, or music, I can draw some sort of emotional qualities out of the words. We're journalistic ones. Like he is sitting there thinking really hard about how to give listeners a slice of complexity, both what a person is intentionally saying with their words and unintentionally revealing

with their behaviors. Yeah, totally. It kind of blew my mind. And the thing is Dylan is just one of 22 people on this team thinking obsessively about every choice they make in the name of bringing you audio that showcases complexity that makes you feel that doesn't waste your time, teaches you something new,

and I'm just coming on here for one last time during the fall pledge season to say that if work like this matters to you, now is an amazing time to support us. The best way to do it is to join our membership program, The Lab. I will admit, I don't usually sign up for these things, but it is super easy.

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Thanks for listening on the Today's show. Oh, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab.

WNYC. Okay, Latif. Hello. Hello. Welcome. Thanks. To Radio Lab. Where are you? Where are you?

While you were on vacation, I got into some reporting. Hi, Jens. Okay, well, where did you go on vacation, I got into some reporting, hi, Jen. Okay. Well, where did you go on vacation? I went to Iceland. Okay. So as you were like flying down over the island, your family's all beside you. I'm guessing covered in snacks underneath you in the ocean.

There was a pretty stunning and kind of terrifying thing happening. Okay. And you were gone and I was curious so I decided to plunge in, so to speak. Okay. There he is with all his books. You look like such a mad librarian. Yeah. Anyway, hey, hey, I got my-

I also brought Soren, our editor with me, and together we called up the guy who I first heard about all this from. I'm Hank Green. I make internet content. Like? I make a lot of science, TikToks and tweets and YouTube videos.

Are you familiar with this gentleman? Yeah, of course. I feel like he's one of the smarter people out there doing science stuff online. Like he's the host of the YouTube channel SciShow. Yeah, but he's also written novels and founded several media companies. Yeah, busy guy Well, we are so thank you. We know you didn't really want to do this I wanted to I just wanted to be very clear Where I was coming from this story is gonna get a little tricky, but it all started for Hank in the middle of summer 2023,

which was a pretty depressing one on the climate change front. The hottest June on record followed by the hottest July on record and for Hank in particular. Mentally, I was in a weird spot. I mean, I was in the midst of being treated for cancer. And during chemo, and I'm through it now, during chemo, I had about a week of being completely useless when I would only consume content, and then like maybe four or five days when I felt good enough to like make stuff. And it makes as you would spend a lot of his

downtime, so just reading, researching, looking online. And I had been confronted by a lot of really sort of apocalyptic. We are reaching the end. I debated on me. Doomsday Prepper, kind of people on TikTok. Having a panic attack for the last hour. Who were looking at the temperature of the North Atlantic Ocean. The president had warming again.

It was hotter than it had ever been. It had been ever been and reported history and things are only getting worse It's not good. The whole of sea and extinction the six extinction event is probably starting now I'm gonna explain this with a visual and all of these tiktokers are pointing to this one And here I can show it to you right here. Oh, you just shared it to me. Okay. Yeah, okay So it's basically a graph of the the sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic over the last couple of decades. It's kind of a pretty graph. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a much squiggly blue lines going up and down and that's sort of the seasonal change. And then you can see the average is going up over time. But then there's a red line, which is this here. And that line is creeping up up up up. And then it has a spike. Sudden red. Uh oh.

Yeah. And that line is like way above the average, even the seasonal ups and downs. It's not even close, like the high jumper is cleared the pole. Yeah. And this spike is happening over the course of months or weeks or... I think it's days. Days, ooh.

An existential threat to everything we know. So all the tiktokers are basically like this is it. It's happening now. This is us falling over the cliff. We're falling over the cliff. Figure out your relationship with Jesus Christ. And are you watching this stuff literally like while you're getting chemo? Yeah, I probably didn't see it like during the moment when the chemo was going into my body,

but certainly during the time when I was just picturing. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, so I'd seen this and are we all about to die? You may have seen this graph. If you have it, I'm sorry. I'm the one. And Hank decides to hop on TikTok himself. Like I made a little series that was like trying to like contextualize it. We're not there yet. We're not anywhere close to there. At the time I was seeing and I was like I don't like it's probably just some kind of natural variation where it's like cooler than average right now in some parts of the world

that's hotter than average in other parts. And also we're entering on El Nino. So El Nino is just like a warmer climate time generally. And you take one little spot on the globe and blips happen. You know, there's natural variation across the earth. I don't know, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried. Like now is not the time to say,

hey, it's getting a lot warmer, but no big deal. Totally. And to be clear, Hank takes this stuff very seriously. As a person who's been worried about climate change for, my dad was the state director of the Nature Conservancy in Florida when I was growing up. So we're a family of environmentalists. My mom's a sociologist, we work on sustainability. And I have a degree in environmental studies. I've been in this for a long time. And it's very scary. This is the biggest problem humanity has ever faced.

But there's sort of a debate that's like, do we need to get people more scared about climate change? Or do we need to get people more hopeful about climate change? Because you go around a bend eventually, where there's nothing to be done, and I will just be hopeless and sad. And I think a lot of people are there. Right. If you're too scared, you tip into nihilism. Yeah. And this is going to be a bell curve of worry that we're all on somewhere. In order to get everybody to the appropriate amount of worry that we're all on somewhere. And in order to get like everybody

to the appropriate amount of worry, we're always pushing some people to way too worried. And like, there's like not really too worried about climate change until and unless you give up on trying to solve the problem. Mm-hmm. So like, I'm... So according to Hank, when it came to this temperature spike

in the North Atlantic, his sense was that these people online were being way too alarmist. There was a sort of a mathematics of gambling guy, which isn't really a climate scientist, as you might expect, who was getting a lot of traction by tweeting about how this was a really big deal. And then he was getting like on the news. Huh.

And so Hank thought, maybe this is a moment to dampen rather than, you know, fan the flings. But that takes time. But also keep the conversation focused on things that we might be able to do. Over the next week or two on my TikTok, I'm going to make some videos about the things that we are actually doing right now, and we'll be doing in the future to help take care of this. So, that is how Hank is spending this hot, hot summer going through chemo, holding a candle

for hope, battling climate nihilism. And then I was scrolling science news in bed late at night, like before going to sleep. I can do. Yeah. He comes across a link to an article that made him sit straight up in bed. Yeah. It's like 11 o'clock at night. I have to get up at 7.30 in the morning and I'm like, oh, I'm going to read a lot right

now. Okay. So the thing he sees, it's this article in science. It's a right up of three recent studies. And what they found is that the spike in the North Atlantic sea temperatures, this like troublingly warming water. This year's spike. That one we're talking about.

This year's recent spike may have been caused by this thing, which is that a few years ago, the UN put into place some regulations that forced cargo ships to start burning cleaner fuel to, you know, reduce the pollution that they make. And that doing that good thing, these papers said that caused the water to get warmer. Yeah. Wait. So they're saying the getting rid of pollution that you would think would make the problem better is actually in this one spot for a while at least making the problem worse. Right. How? All right, so let's go back to before this regulation. This change had happened. All these big, hulky cargo ships are crisscrossing the North Atlantic, chugging along with their big smoke stacks puffing out big plumes of smoggy smoke.

Cargo ships burn like the dirtiest oil. It's like the oil that's left at the bottom. Like that manny, the black manny. Yeah, you have to like, heat it up before it'll even flow, kind of oil. And so there's all this carbon dioxide going out into the air, of course, but there is also all this sulfur dioxide going out into the air.

Okay. And that's horrible. Sofida oxide is bad for people. It's like it's bad to breathe. And then it also is also bad for the environment because it turns into sulfuric acid when it mixes with water. And then it falls down to the earth as acid rain. So that's where acid rain comes from. Which is, which is why the UN wanted to regulate it. But it turns out that in addition to being horrible for human health and making acid rain, But it turns out that in addition to being horrible for human health and making acid rain, sulfur dioxide also does something else.

And actually, can seed clouds. As the ship goes by and it pumps the sulfur dioxide up, you can see just like kind of a contrail that a jet would leave behind, you can see they're called ship tracks. Hank actually showed us a picture of this that was taken from from space. These tracks are like so big. It just looks like giant zebra stripes over the ocean of just white. When there's the right amount of heat and water in the air, you get all of these extra clouds that you normally wouldn't get. Okay. And the clouds reflect the energy of the sun into space. So instead of hitting the water and heating up the surface of the ocean, it hits the cloud. You know, you could think of it

just like a very thin umbrella. And then there's a shadow on the ocean, which keeps the water at least a little bit cooler. So you so suddenly you take that away you burn cleaner fuel and then it's like taking away the beach umbrella You're suddenly just you're the ocean and the ocean is getting blasted by the sun God it it's not unanticipated. This is actually something the climate scientists have known about for decades but it is not intuitive and What this means is that overall, we have not seen the actual full effects of the carbon dioxide.

It's like the warming from carbon dioxide has been worse than you thought up to now. It's just been sort of hidden by all the dirty clouds that we've had blocking light. Right. And if you get rid of that, you're gonna realize just how bad it really is right yeah And that feels like oh things are this is do me like I don't this now seems like a doom on a doom

To me yeah, I agree. I feel like it's a double-decker or doom. Yeah, we're just gonna burn like where I go to more denialism I mean I I Was I found this very exciting and like fascinating, but not angry. You read this tiny and sees a silver lining, a literal silver lining in the smog cloud. A smog cloud that isn't there anymore. Right. The thing that excited me the most about it is we did it and then we undid it in order to make life better for people who are now not breathing that sulfur dioxide into their lungs. But now we have a chance to study what that looks like. He sees these papers and he's like, we have just done a pretty

monumental experiment. Yeah. Because for decades, we had been letting these ships put out these pollutey smoggy smoke trails, which just so happened to act like umbrellas and shade the ocean. And now that we've taken the umbrella away, we can measure how big or small that cooling effect was. But then the broader question is, can you then, if we were doing it before, and we know what the effect was, can you then find another better way to do it intentionally without putting the acid rain stuff, smoggy stuff in the air?

Huh, so like, can we find a cleaner way to do the cloud umbrella just on purpose this time? Yeah. So, it's like, he reads a ton more, he gets really excited. He goes to bed in dreams of like, data and hope and ships. And then he wakes up the next day and fires out this like big Twitter thread

kind of explaining what he sees. And, oh boy When we come back we are headed straight into the hot water that hangs hopes landed him in Stick with us. Lulu, Latif, Radio Lab. We're back talking with Hank Green alongside our editor-sorn Wheeler, and Hank is just hit publish on a long Twitter thread explaining how we might be able to learn something about how to make clouds to keep the ocean cool. Do you remember you put out a thread and then somebody writes back, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Hank, go, yeah. Do you remember the first one you read and how? It might have been that one. Yeah.

That was by the way, a quarter to, no, there was only like three no, I think it was no no no. I think it was between. I mean, certainly it triggered like, please explain to me what I have stepped in here. So what Hank had stepped in was a heated and sometimes vicious debate. As it is coal wine of research, it's unethical and a bad idea.

Among climate activists, He's a sign of desperation. And climate scientists, Can't's out of the bag. People know these options exist. About a little thing called geoengineering. This would not be the first choice. No, no, no, or third or fourth choice. So geoengineering 101, what is it, first of all?

So, yeah, the geoengineering is just any way that you would change the planet intentionally. But in general, when it comes to climate change, we're talking about decreasing the amount of heat in the system of the planet. We'll just do whatever you can to cool things down. And the simplest way you could imagine is like putting a giant mirror in space and reflecting some of the sun's like back, and then there's like a shadow on the planet in that area. Like that's not really what is being proposed.

But okay, I will say that until very recently, I thought this work of geoengineering was kind of like futile, hubris. Like you read these stories of people in the 19th century shooting cannons into clouds to try to get rain to reduce drought. Or you're like, I read about like the Moscow mayor, Yuri Luzov trying to spray a mist of cement on clouds to prevent snowfall.

Yeah, a mist of cement is never a phrase I thought I would ever hear. So like to me, I thought geoengineering was like, not actually that realistic. But what I've learned in talking a hank and digging into all this stuff is that no, the technology is there now, and there are some serious proposals from serious people being entertained seriously, including a proposal to put sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere. Not to be clear. I mean, like, Hank points out that this is very different than the ship clouds you got excited about because those are lower down their local and

they disappear on the scale of days. Whereas sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere would float around the whole planet and be a very thin umbrella wherever it ends up. And also in the stratosphere, it would stay there for a long time. How long? Like years. And there's a lot about this that we just don't know. Like we don't know exactly what's going to get cool list, what's going to get warmer. We don't know how diseases are going to move around in that world. So there are a lot of people who understandably,

when geoengineering comes up are like, no, no, no, no, no, because they're thinking about these unintended consequences, you know, and they're scientists who these unintended consequences, you know, and they're scientists who study this stuff. Like, if the tropics cool, they might dry out. And then you have less monsoon and then you get crop shortage and like, then you actually might get more dust. Right, right, right.

There is going to be a chance that it's really bad for everyone that you set off something that you didn't intend to set off. And then there's also the problem of there are gonna be people who did not decide to do this, who are going to be negatively impacted. A hubris is like that, like we finally found the textbook definition, you know, like let's change the whole planet, the only one we have, and just hope. So Hank is like, yeah, global geoengineering, where you don't know what the effects are, that's bad. Yeah, it's terrifying.

But the opportunity to learn a bunch about this extra cloud formation over the last decades, here's an area of the point that's like, we created clouds on, and now we're not creating clouds on it anymore, and we get to see what the effect of that is. Hank's point is that we can take this smaller local thing that already happened. Look at the data and find out, did it have no effect or half the effect we thought or only over here, but it turned out in the long term it had a different effect.

Those are all questions that would be really useful to know the answers to. The opportunity to study this is huge. And I don't know how else we'd get data like this. So he's not saying do it. He's just saying like research yet. But that brings us to the other flavor of anger Hank was seeing a response to his thread. There were people who were like,

shh, don't tell people about this. There are some people, including climate scientists, who say we shouldn't even talk about geoengineering, like at all. Yeah, that, their main thing is you don't give the fossil fuel industry a way out that's not,

don't burn fossil fuels anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because that's not to be little heck, because that's the trap. That is like a purposeful playbook pioneered by the tobacco industry, you know, it cast doubt, but also point in every direction at any possible shiny thing you can that will distract from the one thing, the one big thing that you are doing that we actually need to change for anything to get better. Yeah, and I've seen it, and I saw it in response to that threat. I saw people say, see environmentalists who are wrong the whole time. We shouldn't be doing all of this extra work. We can keep burning fossil fuels, let's just put sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere and solve the problem that way.

Fossil fuels are fine. Like I saw that. Even as you all are describing geoengineering, like my back gets thrown up and I'm like, oh God, like I'm nervous about that. I'm nervous about talking about this. Yeah, no, I hear it. And I think it's a real question,

whether it's dangerous to even talk about geoengineering. In case people think, oh, okay, let's go ahead and do that. Or they think it means that they don't have to worry about reducing fossil fuel emissions. But, oh, if we don't talk about it, they'll still find it and they will joyfully misinterpret it and it will be the first time a lot of people hear about it. And I'd rather have it the first time that people hear about it, be it from somebody who is perfectly aware that climate change is real. And I especially think that like your first exposure to an idea should be a complex one. Hank's argument is basically because

geoengineering is already in the room, we need to know how to talk about it. We need to figure out in the room, we need to know how to talk about it. We need to figure out whether and how we can do this, like if we should. We have to make the decision if we should. Because Hank says there might come a point where in addition to solving the global long-term problem, we might need to deal with some more local, more short-term problems. One of the biggest problems with global warming is going to be heat. Like, there's going to be places where it is too hot for people to live without air conditioning. And in those places, if the power goes out,

people will just die. Like, in ways that we've never seen, like, he kills people already, but like, we need to be confronting the reality that, like, heat is very deadly. And there are going to be people who are going to be thinking, like, is there a way to just make it less hot

right here right now? Yeah, but you don't want to go back to putting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. I mean, but like you can do it with other stuff. So you could also potentially, though this has not been researched as much as it needs to be, just shoot sea water into the air, which is around, like there's a lot of sea water. When you're on the ocean, You just pump it up and then and mist it into the air, maybe even pump it

to where the smokestack is so that it gets hot and goes higher. And then the salt actually can seed the cloud or the water drop what itself can seed the cloud. And seawater universally known to be not so bad for the ocean. And you'd get your umbrella made of like, virginal sea water, that sounds so great! They're doing it in Australia right now.

It's called apparently marine cloud brightening. Yes, so in Australia there's a small scale experiment that's just trying to make the clouds over the Great Barrier Reef brighter, to try and save the Great Barrier Reef. Try to put a little bit of a cool on that and show things down. Oh. Mm-hmm.

Like that sounds really like benevolent and okay. Isn't that interesting that it sounds benevolent, okay? Because maybe it isn't. Like even if it's local, even if it's temporary, we don't know all the impacts that it's gonna have. Like you could end up in a world where you, you know, the climate changes in a way that makes it really bad for a certain crop or that makes it really good for a certain disease. And like you wouldn't have thought of that one. And now you've heard it, but what

are the ones you haven't thought of? Yeah. Like I will admit, I had a conversion, this whole journey, these past like three weeks of seeing the Tweet research, it getting ready to talk to you, which was that I was like, this is so cool, everyone needs to know about it. But like I feel really torn now because on one hand, like a ship with some salt spraying

feels fine and nice and lovely. But then it's like, is that just a shiny distraction? And more than that, when it comes to nature, there are just as you were saying, there's so many things we don't know that we don't even know, we don't know. And the stakes couldn't be higher. When I think about any chance that someone out there could take this wrong or hear this wrong or decide to jump in whole hog. I'm almost like, just put it back in the box. We can't, though. That's not ours.

That's not for us to do this. I know, but can't we just be like, well, like human clowning. Like, what if we're just doing, like, yeah, we can, there's things we keep in boxes for a little while at least. With the three of us. Shushain is not gonna put anything in the box.

What would you say to me? Because part of me is like, you're leaving, I'm gonna press delete. What would you say to me who's actually tipping over into the, I see the terror of even talking about it? You know, the reality is that we are doing geo-engineering right now just recklessly and thoughtlessly and for countless reasons. But that's not deliberate geo-engineering right now, just recklessly and thoughtlessly, and for countless reasons.

But that's not like deliberate geoengineering, right? That's like, you have been- No, so it's not you, you can't call geoengineering. Right, right. It's just, it's like geo-screwin' around. Stantoliering. Like, but we are changing the climate, so you're saying we already do it already.

Also, like, what we all know is that we should put less CO2 under the atmosphere and also we should take CO2 out. So that's gonna probably be necessary. Like it isn't just gonna be taking, it isn't just gonna be stopping producing it, it's gonna be taking it out. And taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is geoengineering. To engineer, yeah, like carbon capture stuff.

And it will have negative impacts on some people as well as positive impacts on others. Like we're okay with that. So like that's a geoengineering that we're okay with. And we have to figure out like where we're not okay. And I am not here to convince Lula Miller that geoengineering is a good idea. Like I would love for someone to convince me which which way I should feel, because I don't know. I definitely think we should study it.

And talk about it. Yeah. I mean, so long as we're talking about the real problem and real solution at the same time. Yeah. Right. But like, I don't think that we can make a decision by ignoring it. That is like, literally, I was talking about that in therapy this morning. So yeah, I point taken.

Don't just ignore it. So I see your point. It's like you the talking about it could help us to really shut it down. Or to take at least to take the chance with this North Atlantic situation to understand it better. Atlantic situation to understand it better. The difference between how bad it is now and how bad it could get is very big. And weirdly, that makes me hopeful because it means that there's slack. And I don't know, I really believe in humanity. I think that we're a remarkable problem-solving machines

when we recognize problems and look for truth and work together. And that's what science is about. Thank you to Hank Green for coming on to talk to us about this. Big thanks also to Dr. Colin Carson at Georgetown, who studies the potential chain effects of geoengineering, and to Avishai Artsy. This episode was reported by Lulu Miller with help from Alyssa Jung Perry. It was also produced with help from Alyssa Jung Perry

with music and mixing help from Jeremy Bloom. This is Radio Lab. Thanks for listening. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler, Lulu Miller, and Lotta Fnasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Brestler, Aketty Foster Keys, W Harry Fortuna, David Gabel,

Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Nyanasambadam, Matt Kilti, Annie McEwan, Alex Nisen, Sara Kare, Anna Rasquit Paz, Alyssa John Perry, Sarah Sambak, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Timmy Broderick. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Tamara from the Pasadena, California. Leadership Support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational Support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Flown Foundation.