Science Friday - Ocean Climate Solutions, Florida Corals, Climate Video Games. Sept 22, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

Florida’s Reefs Are Vanishing. Can Scientists Save Them?This was a bad year for Florida’s coral reefs. Since the 1970s, reef cover in the Florida Keys has decreased by 90%. Those remaining reefs have been subjected to water temperatures higher than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, alongside other threats like disease and ocean acidification. This is a big problem for the largest reef in the continental U.S., which plays an important role in protecting the shorelines from erosion and storms.Scientists are scrambling to preserve as much of the reef as possible. One method marine biologists are focused on is selectively breeding corals in labs. Scientists look for the specimens most resilient to heat stress, then breed them together to create hardy offspring. Those spawn are then implanted into the reef, with hopes of bolstering the existing structure.Vox environmental reporter Benji Jones joins Ira to talk about his dives to Florida’s Pickles Reef, and the differences he saw between this year and last year. Then, Ira speaks with marine biologist Andrew Baker at the University of Miami about his efforts to bolster Florida’s reefs.  The Ocean Is A Climate AllyDid you know that the ocean absorbs about a quarter of all CO2 emissions? And about 90% of excess heat? It’s the largest carbon sink we have—and one of our biggest allies in the climate movement.Ira talks with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist and co-founder of the non-profit Urban Ocean Lab, as well as the climate initiative The All We Can Save Project. They chat about climate solutions—like the newly launched Climate Corps—the power of the ocean, and steps forward. Dr. Johnson is also the curator for Climate Futurism, an art exhibition at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York. Feeling Hopeless About Climate Change? Try Playing These Video GamesThis segment, originally from 2022, was re-aired this week.Five years ago, Stephanie Barish was tired of the public’s attitude about climate change. “Most people at that time were just so negative about climate,” she said. “It was doom and destruction, and I thought, wow, to make positive change, you have to really look at this from a solutions perspective.” Stephanie is the founder and CEO of Indiecade, an organization that supports indie video game developers and hosts events like the Climate Jam—the goal of which was to change the gloomy public narrative around climate change. So, with the help of organizations like Earth Games, participants around the globe gather every year to make video games about climate change optimism, solutions, and justice.Teams can also consult with subject matter experts, like Dargan Frierson, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, and also a judge for the Climate Jam. If teams wonder what climate change would look like on a different planet, they can go to him for answers. “We always look for scientific accuracy,” he said. “I think it’s very important to keep things within the realm of possibility, even when you’re looking at fiction.”Read the rest at sciencefriday.com. To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. It's Climate Week here in New York, so we thought it would be a pretty good time to focus on our climate crisis and a good place to begin the waters surrounding South Florida, because the coral reefs there are suffering terribly from the effects of climate change. You know, coral reefs are important for a couple of reasons. They protect coastlines from storms, and they're an important part of the oceanic food chain. We talked about this on the show back in July, about how South Florida's waters reached abnormally high temperatures, some over 100 degrees Fahrenheit this summer, and it turns out, as you might have guessed, that these high temperatures are not good for the health of the coral. My next guest dove beneath the waves on one of Florida's reefs, and it's a lot of the coral, and is here to tell us what he saw. Benji Jones, environmental reporter for Vox based in New York. Welcome to

Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me, Ira. Now, Benji, last time I went diving in that area, it was very disappointing. And you recently went on a dive to check out Pickles Reef. Tell me what you saw down there. Yeah. So I was down there in early September, and really when we pulled our boat up to the reef, it was already clear that there was a problem because we could see these bright white patches shining through this kind of beautiful blue ocean water. And then when we dove down to see what that was, we saw these big groups of elkorn coral, these kind of moose antler-like coral, and they were just stark white because they had bleached. And now this isn't the first time you've dived this reef.

you were there watching the spring of 2020. I imagine you must be seeing differences between those two times. Yeah, I mean, that's what made it such a kind of devastating experience diving in September because I had been there with the photographer Jennifer Adler back in April of 2022. And we had seen these beautiful reefs that different organizations were working to restore. And there were these meter wide structures of coral in brilliant orange and bread. and green, and it was really beautiful. And then to come back and see what has happened after the summer, it was just, it was really heartbreaking. And the people that we talked to who were

doing this restoration were really, were really sad about it, as you can imagine. Yeah, we're going to get into the restoration next. But tell me why this is all happening. What does warm water do to the coral that makes it unhealthy for them? Yeah. So excessive heat over a long period of time causes a very fundamental relationship between coral and a type of symbiotic allergy that lives inside of it to break down. So when you look at a healthy coral, it's very colorful. Coral reefs are famously colorful, and most of that color comes from a kind of algae that lives inside coral tissue, and that algae not only makes it beautiful, but also gives coral its food. and when the water gets too hot, in the case of the Florida Keys, it's about 85 degrees or above is considered too hot, then that relationship breaks down. The algae leaves the coral, and what you see, that white color is because there's no algae there, and you're seeing straight through the coral tissue to its skeleton, which is just calcium carbonate. So it is essentially starving. The coral is starving when it looks white. Well, Benji, thank you for sharing the bad news with us. I wish the dives were a little bit better. I wish the reef was. is a little bit healthier, but yeah, I'm glad to be able to chat about it.

Yeah, don't we'll. Benji Jones, environmental reporter for Vox based in New York, and you can read his full story about Pickles Reef on Vox.com. No one wants to just sit back and watch the corals die. So, can we restore Florida's ailing reefs? Some biologists are trying to do that. Andrew Baker is a marine biologist at the University of Miami in Miami, Florida. he has been working on remediating Florida's corals for decades. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Baker. Thanks so much, Ira. It's a real pleasure to be here. Explain to me, please, the work your lab does to try to bring back these corals.

So for a while now, we've been interested in how corals respond to heat stress and increasingly wondering whether there's ways to make corals more thermally tolerant using new approaches and kind of novel ideas. then testing them in the laboratory and seeing if they will work out in the field. So there's a few ways that you can do it. It turns out that there are certain types of algal symbionts in corals that are heat-tolerant, and if the corals have those algal symbionts in them, they're more resistant to bleaching. These algae were discovered during the course of natural bleaching events that happened all over the world dating back really to the early 1980s, and scientists began to discover that corals that had these heat-tolerant types of algae in them

actually didn't bleach and survive through these events better. And that's evolved really in the last five or ten years into trying to figure out if there are ways to get these heat-tolerant algae into corals in advance of a bleaching event and ideally actually even in the early life stages of coral when corals first begin life on the reef to see if we can seed these baby corals with those heat-tolerant allergy to help them survive. Is that what you're trying to do in your lab? That's one of the things that we're trying to do is to provide baby corals, which are produced during coral spawning events by the millions

to try to use that opportunity, that sort of bottleneck where all of the corals offspring are kind of together at one point in time to produce a kind of a scalable approach to seed those babies with the right types of algae and then see if they retain them over time on the reef and ultimately grow up into adult corals that do better. Yeah, how successful have you been at this? So in the lab, it's pretty successful.

You can seed babies with these heat-tolerant algae. You can grow them up to a few months of age, and then you can put them out on the reefs. And in lab tests, we've been able to show that those corals are indeed significantly more thermally tolerant than the corals that you provide with sort of the normal algae. You know, the early trials of putting those out onto reefs are still kind of in the early days. And so actually the bleaching event that is happening right now will be the first kind of natural test of some of these approaches to see whether, in fact, the approaches that we've used in the lab to try to produce a field trial actually work. And so we're kind of waning to see what happens as this event develops. What other novel approaches are being used to help save reefs?

Well, I think recently there's been tremendous appreciation and understanding of the role that reefs have in protecting our own. our coastlines from the damaging effects of storms and flooding. And even recently, the Department of Defense has recognized that they could use nature-based solutions like coral restoration to try to protect coastlines. But you can't restore reefs unless you're really trying to incorporate methods for increasing heat tolerance and making those corals more resilient to climate change at the same time. We don't want to be just planting out the next set of climate victims and waiting for the next bleaching event to wipe them out. And so the Department of Defense recently invested in a project to build what are called hybrid reefs, reefs that are a combination of an artificial

structure on top of which corals are grown to try to make that structure self-building and self-repairing. But those corals need to be the most resilient climate stress, hardy corals available to us. And so there's been a lot of interest in, can we leverage the huge interest in protecting coastlines and the infrastructure that is saved by doing that into a program of coral restoration that really takes advantage of these new approaches to building heat tolerance into corals and tries to scale that up. So I think there's a great nexus of opportunity right now between realizing that not only a coral reefs under threat and they really need a massive effort to try to save them, but our coastlines are under threat. And if we can kind of marry those two,

objectives, we can actually have a chance at scaling up the solutions that we're working on at the scale with which they need to operate to have a chance of success. Now, you've been doing this for nearly 30 years. How do you keep hope alive that all of this work will help bring the Carls back? Yeah, I think it's a huge challenge. When people have been working for so long and people have been restoring reefs for so long, it's disastrous to see the reefs that you've been trying to restore just die in the space of a couple of months due to an event which on some level was entirely predictable. We've known as scientists that coral bleaching events are going to happen.

This is entirely predictable. The event that we're seeing now, it's always been a question of when that event would happen and not so much if that event was going to happen. But even knowing that it's predictable and even knowing that this is sort of around the corner, having it actually happen and having it happen with the magnitude that it occurred and the sort of severity with which that hammer came down has been really disconcerting because we had hoped that these kinds of bleaching events might accumulate over time, they might get progressively worse, but we were suddenly hit with just a huge event. So how do you keep hope alive during that?

I think a lot of coral biologists who are working in the field are right now hit with, you know, a word that I came across recently, which is solostalgia, which is a word given to the distress or anxiety produced by environmental change, usually on your home environment. When you see your home environments, the places that you've studied and been around for so long get devastated, it's hard to maintain a sense of optimism about the future. And I think that's what solostalgia is about. For me, the tool that I've used to try to maintain a sense of optimism for the future, is that you know, is that I remember when I was a graduate student going, you know, back to the 1990s, people used to tell me here in Florida how wonderful the reefs used to be in the 1970s and 1980s.

And there was a sense already then amongst kind of old-timers of what had been lost. And scientists have a name for this idea, which is the idea of a shifting baseline, that new generations of scientists come in and they have new impressions of what constitutes natural and what constitutes healthy. So when I see what's happening right now, I take myself back to that time in the 1990s, and I remind myself that if we could have gone back now to the 1990s state, I would have, you know, traded everything at an instant to be able to do that.

And yet at the time, back in the 1990s, I was told that the reefs back then were just a shadow of what they used to be. So I think I always try to remember that no matter, how bad things get, the opportunity to go back in time to where we are now in the future is just going to be tremendously valuable. It's sort of a sense of if I don't do something now, 30 years from now, I'll be sorry. I didn't try. Yeah, it's how do we avoid this kind of sense of regretful hindsight?

No matter how things look now, I know that in 2045 or 2050, we would give our eye teeth to go back to where reefs are now in 2023, even though right now we're lamenting the losses that we've had. So I think we always tend to undervalue what we still have left because we're always lamenting the loss, mourning the change. But in fact, reefs still hold tremendous possibilities and we will only realize how valuable they were in retrospect. Yeah. Well, we wish you great luck for both your work and for the health of the reefs. And we'll check back with you to see how it's all going, okay? That would be wonderful. Thanks so much, Ira. You're welcome. Dr. Andrew Baker is a

marine biologist at the University of Miami and Miami, Florida. When we come back looking to the oceans for climate solutions, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato, continuing our climate conversations. This time we're headed to the oceans. The unsung heroes of the climate, did you know that the ocean absorbs about a quarter of all CO2 emissions?

It's the largest carbon sink we have. and one of our biggest allies in the climate movement. Here to talk about climate solutions and the power of the ocean is Dr. Ayanna, Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist, writer, and co-founder of the nonprofit Urban Ocean Lab, as well as the Climate Initiative, the All We Can Save Project. She's joining me from New York. Welcome back to Science Friday.

Hello, Ira. Thanks for having me back. Nice to have you. Well, as we say on this show, it is Climate Week in New York, activists from around the world are here. There are protests, speeches in the street. Have you been participating? What's it like? It is the most amazing collection of people who care about the future of life on earth in all the different ways. I went to the climate march on Sunday. I've been speaking in various press events, going to dinners, meeting old friends, meeting current and hopefully future collaborators. It's a great

time to be in New York and just think about what is possible if we each play our part and figure out how to team up. Okay, I want to talk about the ocean, which is the underappreciated hero when it comes to climate change, right? Yeah, the ocean not only has absorbed about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that we've emitted into the atmosphere by burning greenhouse gases, but it has also absorbed over 90 percent of the heat we've trapped with those greenhouse gases. So the earth would be dozens of degrees hotter if it weren't for the ocean buffering the impacts of all that we humans are throwing at it. Does it have a limit, though? Absolutely.

The ocean has already increased in temperature about a degree Celsius, and that is having all sorts of impacts on marine life, on ocean currents, on food security, on fisheries, on hurricanes. We know that warmer oceans fuel stronger and wetter storms. So a lot of things are very much out of balance with the ocean. But your work focuses on climate solutions, right? I mean, people are so worried about the climate. Why should we be looking towards the oceans for help then? Well, it's estimated that the ocean holds about 20% of our climate solution. And that includes everything from renewal.

energy offshore, which right now is primarily wind energy. That includes reducing the emissions from shipping. That includes my favorite, which is nature itself, the wetlands, mangrove, sea grasses, coral reefs, oyster reefs that are absorbing carbon and protecting our shorelines. And that also includes things like regenerative ocean farming, which is a way to grow seaweed and shellfish, which is a super low impact way to feed ourselves and provide lots of jobs in coastal communities. And so how much can the ocean solutions help, let's say, energy-wise? I think it kind of depends how much we scale and where. We are starting to think about through Urban Ocean Lab, the policy think tank that I am co-founder of,

how offshore wind energy can become a main source of power for coastal cities, where, for example, we don't have enough space for solar panels for all of the energy that's used, but we can think about wind turbines offshore as a big part of that solution, which I'm excited about because about 40% of Americans live in coastal counties, 20% of us live in coastal cities. So there really is an opportunity to get it right at those local levels up and down all of our coastlines. Those would be human-made solutions. I know you just mentioned that your favorite solution was nature itself.

How much more could nature do for us? That's a good question. I mean, the best example that I can think of is, since I'm sitting here in New York, when Hurricane Sandy hit the New York, New Jersey area, 85% of the wetlands that were historically here had already been destroyed by various forms of development, all the buildings and infrastructure that we have here. But the 15% that remained prevented over $600 million in damage. So when we think about the capacity of the ocean to buffer the impacts of climate change,

part of that is storms and part of that is just the tons of carbon that these coastal ecosystems can sequester. So a wetland, for example, could absorb three, four, or even five times as much carbon as the same amount of area in a tropical forest. So we often overlook marshy areas when we're thinking about climate solutions and think just about planting trees, but we certainly need to expand our purview on that

to just think about photosynthesis more broadly. That's amazing. I never realized how much... Yeah, shout out to wetlands. Shout out to the ocean. No, I mean, even the wetlands, because everybody has wetlands on the coasts, right? and even in the lakes and rivers. So there's a huge potential then.

Super important ecosystem as well as a source of a home for a lot of biodiversity and a habitat for a lot of juveniles of species that end up being important for fisheries and more. Yeah. Well, because you have this tug of war going on now because we have more intense storms that are ripping apart the wetlands, right? We just saw this with the storm, the hurricane moving up the coast. So now we have to pay more attention to rejuvenating those wetlands. And one thing that we know is that for every dollar or so that's invested in coastal ecosystem, restoration and protection, that saves us $7 in damages from storms.

And we also know that coastal ecosystems can be more effective coastline protection than even a seawall. They have this more dynamic ability to adapt to a changing environment. So a lot of the times when we think about the future and we think about infrastructure, we think primarily about all of that concrete and steel as opposed to green infrastructure, which is nature itself in all of its permutations and the ways that we can support its rejuvenation. Very interesting. Okay, so I want you to put on your visionary hat now and tell me, tell me what you would like to say. happen for the ocean and climate? What is your vision? I think the first step is just to appreciate the role that the ocean can play in climate solutions and think about scaling up all of that work. Think about renewable energy, wind energy offshore with jobs in coastal communities and

regenerative ocean farms dotting the coastline, seaweed from those farms that's becoming fertilizer, that's becoming animal feed, that's becoming part of our food system, endless oysters that we could all be eating that are filtering excess nutrients out of the water and are part of a healthy ecosystem, protecting our shorelines, providing us delicious snacks to eat. I'm thinking about all of the green jobs that are possible, especially this week as we celebrate the Biden administration's creation of an American Climate Corps, training a whole generic of young people to work in these industries of restoring ecosystems and renewable energy. Let me, let me do a little more on that. Is that really a big event? How important is that?

Huge deal. So this has been an idea that's been floating around for years now. It's modeled off of President FDR's concept of a civilian conservation corps that was part of the New Deal, which was badly implemented and left a lot of people out, left out people of color, left out women, but was really focused on getting our national park system and in place and for park rangers and trail creation. And Governor Jay Inslee resurrected this concept and put together a new version of it

that he called the Civilian Climate Corps, the CCC. And that idea was a much more inclusive vision for putting Americans to, to work to do all of this climate adaptation that is needed because of the changes that are already happening and are going to accelerate. And so this idea was put forth in his presidential campaign. When he left the race as a climate candidate, Elizabeth Warren picked up this concept and carried that forward.

When she left the race, Biden was encouraged to champion this idea and he included it in his platform. and after he was elected, he has been trying to make good on this promise, including it in the Build Back Better Act, which was then a much smaller version of that proposal. As you know, was passed as the Inflation Reduction Act. And this civilian climate core idea got stripped at the last minute as the Senate was trying to get this finalized and over the finish line. But the Biden team didn't give up on this idea because it is so important to make sure that we have job opportunities for young people, green job opportunities that were training people for the economy of the future and the sectors that are going to need employees. So I was just so over the moon yesterday to know that like through the AmeriCorps program, they had created what Biden is calling the American Climate Corps, which aims to train 20,000 young people in its first year. And hopefully that proof of concept will lead to future appropriations.

from Congress so this program can really, really grow. And there are similar programs in a lot of different states across the country already. And so to me, this is really an inflection point for, like, how do we start to build the future? And that starts with people who are trained to do the physical transformation that's needed. It, you know, prioritizes wetland restoration and forests and coastlines and energy conservation and water management, as well as things that we know. normally think of green jobs like solar and wind energy. Yeah, and does it fulfill a core tenet of your kind of work, the intersection of climate, race, social justice culture also?

Absolutely, because they're, you know, aiming this program at young people from historically disadvantaged communities, making sure to not repeat the mistakes of the past where similar government programs really were only open to and benefiting white men, a small segment of our current population. So I love the idea that this is something that will be open to everyone and really encouraging a diverse cohort of young people who are helping to build the future. Now, I know you founded the Urban Ocean Lab.

Why focus on cities in the first place? That sounds almost counterintuitive. Well, about 20% of Americans live in a coastal city. So that's one in five people in this country who live in places that need to be ready to adapt to our changing climate, thinking about sea level rise, thinking about storms, thinking about all of these opportunities we just described with coastal ecosystems and our food system. And so in addition to just the percentage of people who live in coastal cities, it's also a really discrete unit of government. While it can be very hard to get federal policy changed, cities can often be much more nimble in how they approach policymaking and trying out new initiatives. And they're always learning from each other, from mayor to mayor, from conservation and environment department in one cities to another. And so we thought Urban Ocean Lab would be a great opportunity to champion some of these policy ideas, make sure there is a resource hub that we're sharing lessons learned,

that we're proposing different policy solutions so that these different cities aren't reinventing the wheel and have the policy analysis they need to consider what might be appropriate there. So our work has been ramping up. We recently just released a document identifying over $30 billion that are available for coastal cities in the Inflation Reduction Act. So we're also trying to connect the dots between the resources available and the places that need to start implementing. more and more of these projects.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're talking about how the ocean may offer us some climate solutions with Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson. Let's talk about policy. You've brought it up. I've heard about the Green New Deal, but you've been working on the Blue New Deal.

What is that? Well, when I read the Green New Deal, which I would encourage everyone to read because it's actually only 12 pages long. It's double-spaced. It's super readable. A lot of times we think about policy as something we could never understand

or it's hundreds of pages. But the Green New Deal was really just this framework describing what it would look like if we included climate in American, in federal policy, in a really broad and deep and meaningful way, making the transformation that we need in our society and our economy to address this crisis. And I read it and I thought,

This is a really exciting vision, but it basically leaves out the ocean. And because the ocean is 20% of our climate solution, because it's 70% of our planet, because 40% of Americans live in coastal counties, if we don't include the ocean in a significant way in our federal climate policy, it simply will not be complete. And so with a bunch of colleagues, I started to develop this concept of what would a blue new deal include. And that includes a lot of the things we've already mentioned, but also are, you know, shipping and ports and coastal infrastructure, as well as, you know, fisheries

and ways to address sea level rise and protect and restore coastal ecosystems, et cetera. And all the infrastructure we're going to need to develop offshore renewable energy. That requires policy frameworks, right? How are we permitting, you know, seaweed farming? How are we dealing with, you know, all of the working waterfront that's, needed for renewable energy offshore. So it was a really exciting exercise in thinking about this that was championed by Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign. And a lot of the elements of that have been included in the Biden administration's work. So the Blue New Deal was just an attempt

to say, hey, guys, don't forget about the ocean. You know, I was just talking to paleontologist Michael Mann. And he is actually saying, you know, let's not think that the sky is, falling here. We have to work out of an idea of hope because there is time to turn things around. Because talking about climate change is scary, right? Do you agree with that? I think the word that I lean towards more than hope, I wouldn't call myself an optimist per se, but I think there is a huge amount of possibility. I think we all have an opportunity to contribute to shaping the future. I think we have almost all of the climate solutions that we need in order to make the transformation that needs to happen. And so it's really just a matter of how quickly we're

going to implement all of these solutions that we have, right? We know how to green buildings. We know how to improve transportation. We know how to conserve energy. We know how to farm regeneratively. it's just a matter of how quickly people will take up these solutions and charge ahead with them. So there is a huge amount of possibility. How quickly will we actually do it? I have no idea. But every day I kind of wake up and see what I can do to contribute to moving these things forward. Climate change is one of those things where every little bit matters, right?

There's not a magic number or date after which we have succeeded or failed. this is the work of our lifetimes. And as much as we can rain in climate disaster, the better off will be. Well, thank you so much for taking time to be with us today. Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. Dr. Ayana, Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist, writer, and co-founder of the nonprofit Urban Ocean Lab, as well as the Climate Initiative, the All We Can Save Project. she was joining us from New York. After the break, exploring climate solutions through a video game. Oh, it's fun to play this one. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm I'm I Refledo. So far today, we've talked about climate history,

activism, comedy, and now we're going to focus on a video game inspired by climate change. Last year, sci-fi producer, D. Peter Schmidt, who also hosts our new podcast, Universe of Art. learned about an indie game-making competition, focused on making games about climate change solutions, and we wanted to highlight that story again. Here's D explaining the competition, which is called a game jam. Okay, so yeah, you're working on a team to make something in this case like a video game in a very short amount of time. And there's this one that I found out about called the climate jam. It's put on by this organization called Indycade.

and the goal of this jam is to make games about climate change. Our goal of having a climate jam has always been to have climate solutions and to be positive. Like we're not looking for some kind of like death and destruction jam. So that was Stephanie Berish. She's the CEO of Indycade. And she and some other partners started the climate jam five years ago. We're really interested in challenging our community to create something that can

potentially make a positive. difference. Most people at that time were just so negative about climate. Like it was doom and destruction. And I thought, wow, to make positive change, you have to really look at this from a solutions perspective. All right. She says you have to look at it from a solutions perspective. So you make a game. Have we got a game that won? Yeah, I want to know how that turned out. Yeah, so the game that won is called Roe, and we're actually going to play together. Ooh, all right, let's do that. But before we go, says this is brand new to me.

You've got to give me a hint of what the game is all about. Okay, all right. So basically, Roe's set in a future where the effects of climate change are a lot more exaggerated. Drought is a much bigger problem. There are these two neighboring cities, and when it stops raining, one city builds a dam to hoard all the water, and it leaves the other one in a pretty tough spot. So there's drought, people are getting sick because of dehydration, including your character's grandmother, and the other city is unwilling to share the water.

So your character takes a rowboat to get some fresh water from the other city to get your grandma healthy again. But the rain suddenly start again with a vengeance, and a huge flood ends up submerging and destroying both cities in kind of the middle of your journey. So through all of this, you have to become rowing partners with someone from the other city who's basically your enemy and you have to work together to survive. So yeah, let's get started. Should I hit the play button on there?

Yeah, let's go ahead and hit play. Okay. I see it says, welcome to your rowboat. Okay, now I'm rowing. Oh, that was a good stroke. I see how to do this. Yeah. It takes shorter strokes.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too. Oh, really? Whoa, I'm going zipping across. Wait, there's another item. It's a fun game. This is a fun game. All right, so we're going to put down our oars for a second. We'll come back to the game later, but I just wanted to tell you about some of the other games that were made for the climate jam this year.

So there's one called Denial Network, and in that one you play as a group of activists fighting against climate change misinformation. There's another called ChangeWaker, where you play as a cute little sentient blob sailing around an archipelago, helping other cute little sentient blobs solve environmental problems impacting their islands. And sometimes Stephanie says these games actually break outside the boundaries of the jam. Last year, a group did a game about garbage collection and recycling. And they ended up going to their city government and creating a game for the city based on the prototype they had created. And having social impact isn't the only unique thing about the climate jam. When you join this game jam, you don't just have access to people who can help you make the game.

We have people who are content experts. I'm Dargan Fryerson. I'm a professor of atmospheric sciences at University Washington. So Dargan was actually one of these content experts, and he was also a mentor and a judge for the jam. We always look for scientific accuracy. I think it's very important to keep things within the realm of possibility, even when you're looking at fiction. Having science mentors as part of our jams is completely unique. Most jams, honestly, aren't about serious topics. When you have a serious topic, you try and bring in experts. In this case, when people are making games, they really need to understand the information.

They need to understand, you know, how wind turbines work or what the real situation is for sea creatures. You get a lot of pretty off-the-wall questions. They're questions like, what would climate change be like on a different planet? We're just trying to make sure that the games are as accurate as possible. Probably most folks who were listening were like me and thought that most games were sort of violent oriented. But there is this growing movement of folks making games for social change. We're trying to sort of acknowledge that we humans as a species play one of the biggest roles in causing the climate crisis.

And at the same time, we also hold the key to solving it. So I also talked to Jay McGregor. He's a film production student at USC. and part of a team of seven who worked on the game and who was one of its narrative designers. The game is focusing on the human dimension of the climate crisis, like in terms of our relationships with each other and how that will help us deal with it. I love that immediately with Roe, you're thrust into this very cinematic situation with a lot of drama and you're clearly a very impoverished community that, as it turns out,

has been dealing with environmental justice, threat. And that, on top of just gameplay, that's pretty fun rowing. You know, it's really fun just to move your boat slowly and steadily. It gives you time to ponder the deepness of the narrative. Okay, so there's this feature in the game Ira

called the trust meter. So I think that's on your screen right now. Can you read those instructions? The trust meter measures the level of trust between you and Nico. The value affects how easily you're able to row with him. Oh, so we have to row together.

Mm-hmm. Right. So there's going to be moments where you have to make a decision through different dialogue options you get or actions you take that'll affect your trust level with your enemy, Nico. So what's your level of trust with him right now? 82%. Nice. I have been choosing some other dialogue options. I'm at like 45% right now. Ultimately, the idea of that was like the way you interact with each other either increases your ability to cooperate or can entrench the level of animosity between you two.

And if you guys don't trust each other as much, you're guys are going to go slower because you're going to be in sync and you have to kind of try hard to work together. And so if you make a choice that increases the trust between you and Nico, you can build human capital, which is an important resource to escape the crisis you guys are in. So I've known about the climate jam for a couple years. And before I fully played through it, I was kind of surprised a game like Roe that on its face really leans into these classic climate dystopian themes. won the grand prize for a competition that's focused on climate optimism and solutions. So I asked Jay why his team wanted to focus on dystopia so much. Yeah, it's kind of doom and gloom with the whole dystopia world. But at the same time, I think if you just stay in that place of just feeling hopeless,

it can often translate into apathy, which I can see a lot among people who are my age. because it's such a daunting thing. And so we wanted to go through that emotion of feeling hopeless, but then having conflict occurred that would make people have to change in some way. We can't really solve this issue of the climate crisis without some form of collective action. And then in order to have collective action, that requires us to work with each other,

including those that we might not necessarily agree with. And so hopefully, I think that's a power of video games. They have a very sort of interactive participatory element to them that can not only change people at an intellectual level in terms of making them aware of these issues, but also can touch people at an emotional level. And I think that's a powerful thing. Rowe is kind of dystopian in certain ways,

but the fact that they ultimately create a situation where opposing characters can connect and have to work together is an incredible statement. And they bury you deeply into that antagonist. that's going on. So I think it's really effective. And I think those are the tools that narrative games really give you to work with. I think it's so important because, gosh, don't we live in a world where it's very hard to cross the aisle and work together? We all do kind of have a common cause. And if there's ways, even in our differences that we can work together towards it, that's how we'll

have a bright and beautiful future. Well, I think this is an interesting game to play with kids. Yeah. Right? So then you could have a discussion about hopefulness and making decisions about your future and who do you trust and how to trust people. Because, yeah, a lot of things we see are dystopian and a lot of things that are happening now make you think that the future is going to be dystopic. Maybe this is a kind of game that you can have a teaching opportunity to play with kids. And maybe they can talk out their fears by playing this game. What did you feel about being on the raft or surviving or making a choice of who to save?

Yeah. And I know not everyone plays video games. Not everyone's going to get a chance to play these, but there is something Dargan said about why he thinks this matters, and I thought it was a great point. As a climate scientist, I spent a lot of time just looking at data, computer model simulations, and you see a lot of red dots meaning drought or really strong rainfall events. But I think to see that through artistic eyes, you realize how much story there is behind any of those data points, behind any kind of extended drought. There's always going to be winners and losers and those fighting over scarce resources. And then the approaching flood in this game also is just really dramatic. It makes you think that all data should be analyzed with an artistic eye in that way.

And that kind of reminded me of what you just said about. kids talking about their fears, playing through them. It's like basically the appeal of a horror movie, to me at least. You're able to like experience these kind of intense emotions in a controlled, safe environment and have a little removed from it. And maybe process them in a way you wouldn't be able to if you were too close to it. Yeah. Well, thank you. I enjoyed it. I loved it. I'm, you know, I'm going to play it again. Can I play it again? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. I'm going to try the other options to see what happened. Okay, great. Well, other people can play Roe and the other games from this year's climate jam.

And you can even listen to a song that Dargan wrote and sang about his love of science, which is amazing. That's all at our website at ScienceFriiday.com slash games. Yeah, thanks again, Ira. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Today we're talking about our climate crisis from so many angles. But you know what? There's still so much more to talk about. So we're a continuing the conversation with next month's Cy Frye Book Club Pick. We'll be reading the Future Earth, a radical vision for what's possible in the age of warming by Eric Holt House. What's the book about and how can you get involved in our book club? Here with the answers is Cy Fri's Experiences Manager Diana Plasker. Hi, Diana. Hey, Ira. Great to have you, Diana.

All right, let's get right to it. What is the book about? Give me a brief overview. So the book focuses on the next 30 years from when it was written, 2020 through 2050. And what we have to do now, it helps a reader kind of imagine their own part in building a better world that works for everyone and reminds them that it's not too late by any means, which I think is really needed in this day and age. Yeah. Yeah, we need something positive, right? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. It's a mix of scientific research and interviews, descriptions of imagined futures, policy, and infrastructure plans.

And throughout, it's a reminder that people who make these decisions are already here. And these solutions have already been proposed. We just need to make those choices. And I want to be careful about the we. It's not a book about individual action per se, but instead how individual actions fuel big changes that need to be made by people in power. politicians, corporations, and the like. Yeah, there are so many books about climate change out now, so many different angles. Why did you select this one for the book club?

Yeah, it was a really hard decision, Ira. This month, we're actually reading a collection of fictional short stories called Afterglow. So I wanted to follow up that with a nonfiction book focused on climate change solutions. The book club members have been asking for months and months about a book that would balance this idea of radical hope with plausible solutions. So I read a few books, all of which were really amazing in their own right. But the future Earth left me feeling energized, focused, and optimistic about the future. Yeah. Wow, that is good. That is a good feeling. Yeah. Well, actually, I have a question for you. The importance of storytelling is one of the

big focuses of this book as well. And I just wanted to sort of turn it. back and ask you, if you can tell us about a time that you remember when some of your bestly plans were upended and you felt pretty certain that it was because of climate change. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. I would certainly have to say, 2012 superstorm Sandy started out as a hurricane by the time I got to my neighborhood in New York. It was a superstorm Sandy. And that changed everything. That, you know, the way that progressed, the way it blew up, the science. of the storm. It was all what climatologists were telling us that climate change, our climate crisis would look like. And that all happened. And that put, right, that put everybody's

plans on all for months, if not years. Yeah. You know, it's funny because that's very similar for me, Ira. I was living far from home at the time and being disconnected from my family was really scary. And so I'm not surprised that we actually shared that. So here's a thing. A good story, personalizes problems. It makes them feel more immediate and it can actually physically change our brain's chemistry and it's more likely for us to sort of generate empathy. So that's my hope for readers with this book and for everyone who just heard your story today too, Ira. I'm sure everybody has their own story and they will probably be thinking about it, right? When they read this book, so how can folks get involved if they want to read along with you? Tell us. Yeah, they can participate in so

many different ways. They can read the book, attend an upcoming event. We have a few coming up in October. They can start their own local book club. They can sign up for our email newsletter. My favorite way is to join our online community space. It's free to join. It's got lots of amazing people across the country and across the world who talk about these topics throughout the month. And I hope that everyone listening today will join if they haven't already. The name of the book again is The Future Earth by Eric Holdhouse. That's terrific. Thank you, Diana. Thanks, Ira.

And if you do want to learn more about the book club, including upcoming events and how to enter to win a free book book. Who doesn't want that? Go to science friday.com slash book club. Science Friday.com slash book club. If you missed any part of the program or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcast or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And, of course, we're active all week on social media. But how about trying our newsletters? science Friday.com slash newsletters. I invite you to try them out. I think you're going to enjoy them.

And of course, you can reach out to us the old-fashioned way, SciFri, at ScienceFriday.com. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.