In late June, we hosted this year's second Ars Live event, a conversation with climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, who holds positions with the financial services company Stripe and at the Berkeley Earth Project, which tracks the global surface temperatures. We wanted to get his perspective on why those temperatures have been setting extreme records with regularity of late, but we took a little detour on the way, asking how he ended up doing climate science in the first place.
It turned out to be a very indirect route. He'd been a climate activist during his college years and helped launch a couple of cleantech startups afterward. At the time, some of the first academic climate bloggers were getting started, and Hausfather found himself doing small projects with them. Over time, he decided "my hobby was more fun than my day job," so he decided to take time off from the business world and get a PhD in climate science. From there, he's kept feet in both the climate and business worlds.
The conversation then moved to the record we have of the Earth's surface temperatures and the role of Berkeley Earth in providing an alternate method of calculating those. While the temperature records were somewhat controversial in the past, those arguments have largely settled down, and Berkeley Earth played a major role in helping to show that the temperature records have been reliable.
Lately, those temperatures have been unusually high, crossing 1.5°C above pre-industrial conditions for the first time and remaining elevated for months at a stretch. Scientists have been coming up with a number of explanations and figuring out how to test them. Hausfather described those tests and what we're learning about how these things might be influencing the trajectory of our warming.
From there, we moved on to user questions, which addressed issues like tipping points, the potential use of geoengineering, and what things Hausfather would most like to see in terms of better data and new questions to answer. For details on these issues and the answers to viewer questions, see the video above. We also have a full transcript of the conversation.
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