Oh My Sabine
Serious -- and fun. And funny.
Resource Friday, folks! In which I share cool sites, channels, publications — whatever I’ve come across and have found instructive, insightful, entertaining, or all of the above.
This week I’m recommending a brilliantly gifted YouTuber-scientist who teaches deep, controversial, and pertinent subjects with droll pizazz.
Her name is Sabine Hossenfelder.
You’ll want to subscribe to her YouTube channel.
Climate
How hot can it get? And why worry?
Personal note. I took a class on climate change waaaaaay back in graduate school, in the 1990’s. I had a fair background in scientific modeling. Most of climate science has to do with the models — the data too, yes, but really the models. Even waaaaay back in the day, the upshot of my class, the nugget of the whole problem, was that it’s going to come down to the clouds. In short, clouds reflect sunlight during the day, hence are a cooling factor. On the other hand, clouds — like greenhouse gases — hold heat near the earth, especially during the night. A warming earth generates moisture, which creates more clouds. Which cloud factor is going to win? Sabine’s presentation is all about models and clouds. Hence, I’m inclined to take it seriously. Caveat — I’m neither a physicist nor a climatologist.
She gets pretty doomsday in her assessment of “what this might mean” at around minute 14:00. It seems I now need to go research climate migration. Along with the related problem of ecosystem collapse and biodiversity, millions (billions?) of humans may end up becoming climate migrants. And that might be the Big One.
Nuclear
Sabine’s wishlist (from previous climate video):
Put a price on carbon
Expand renewables
Build nuclear. Build nuclear. Build nuclear.
And why would we ever not build nuclear? What are the good arguments? What are the bad ones? You might be surprised. Watch this next. →
Sabine has many other videos on energy-related topics. I’m beginning to dip in. Have you watched any of them? Care to recommend what I should watch next?
For Your Weekend
Or for whenever life’s got you down.
Or if you’re a Monty Pythonista.
Who knew? She sings, too.
I was briefly in a small writing group with Allie Tempus (Alexandra) who has a book coming out about internal climate migration in the US. She writes in part about efforts to move entire communities out of harm's way (not a good solution apparently). There was a spurt of articles on how people should move to Duluth or other upper parts of the US to avoid some of the effects but when I asked her about that she said something that stuck with me: Nowhere is safe.