Volts So, how's the climate doing?
43 snips
Feb 6, 2026 Dr. Sarah Kapnick, climate scientist and former NOAA chief scientist now advising on climate risk at JPMorgan Chase. She discusses advances in attribution science, satellite methane detection, AI and computing improving forecasts, the effects of reduced shipping aerosols, tipping-point monitoring, and how climate science translates into legal and financial decisions.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Host's Early Climate‑War Memory
- David Roberts recounts early climate‑science online fights and a mention by Rush Limbaugh that brought angry mail.
- He used that era to pivot from climate science followership to focusing on clean energy reporting.
Attribution Science Reached Practical Confidence
- Attribution science matured because the climate signal now exceeds natural variability and supercomputing lets researchers run many model realizations.
- That allows quantifying how much climate change increased the likelihood of specific extreme events.
Coral Reefs Are Near-Term Losses
- Coral reefs are experiencing near-term tipping-like die-offs tied to ocean heat spikes during El Niño events.
- Repeated bleaching increasingly prevents recovery, making coral loss a tangible, near-term climate impact.