Richard Seager is a climate scientist at Columbia University and has been an Englishman in New York for more than 30 years. In this conversation, he talks about what will happen to the tropical Pacific under global warming (and why the climate models are wrong about that), about his passion for jazz and how it…

Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, “Gun Island”, takes its readers on an adventurous journey from the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans to raging wildfires in Los Angeles and to a Venice that is inexorably sinking into the sea. Amitav is one of the most accomplished writers in either India or the US, the two countries in…

This is a bonus episode, thrown together quickly, as the coronavirus pandemic is evolving at such a rapid pace that predicting what it will look like in the weeks ahead is incredibly difficult. The guest is Jeff Shaman, one of the world’s experts in modeling the spread of infectious diseases. He is a professor in…

Why should we trust science? Historian of science Naomi Oreskes has pondered this question for years, and here she talks about the surprising answer she has come up with (hint: it’s not because of the scientific method). Naomi, a geologist by training, also talks about her time working for a mining company in Australia, the…

Michela Biasutti studies rainfall in the tropics – when and where it rains, and why. She does this at Columbia University in New York, where she settled down after her scientific curiosity had first led her to move from her native Italy to Seattle. Michela is one of many foreign-born scientists who have managed to…