When talking about climate change solutions, we often hear about reducing emissions and adapting to climate impacts, but a third option is starting to get more attention: altering the atmosphere. In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate), MIT alumnus Janos Pasztor joins host Laur Hesse Fisher to explain geoengineering: what it is and the different technologies that are being researched. They also dive into the opportunities and challenges presented by geoengineering, and what difficult decisions we might need to make as a society.

Is it too late to prevent climate change? Are the scary predictions that we hear about inevitable? In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned Climate), MIT Prof. Noelle Selin joins host Laur Hesse Fisher to answer these questions. They explore what change is predictable, explain what climate goals like 1.5 C mean, and give insight to what it will take in order to achieve them.

The electric grid are networks that carry electricity from central power plants to our homes. But how exactly is electricity generated and brought to our door? And what needs to change if we’re going to transition to generating “clean” electricity? In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate), Harvey Michaels, lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, joins host Laur Hesse Fisher to explain the history and perhaps surprising features of the electric grid, and what changes are in store for the future.

Fossil fuels -- coal, natural gas, and oil -- provide the large majority of our power in the United States and around the world. In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate), John Reilly of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change joins host Laur Hesse Fisher to demystify fossil fuels: what are the different kinds of fossil fuels, and how do they compare to each other? What is “fracking” and how did impact energy use and CO2 emissions in the United States? What kinds of decisions do we need to make to transition to clean energy, while providing electricity to a growing number of people?

In this mini-episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate), host Laur Hesse Fisher breaks down what we’re actually talking about when we use the word “energy”. In a few minutes, we cover the difference between energy and electricity, and the big picture strategy for how to reduce CO2 for each.

What will it take to generate the electricity our society needs, without generating carbon emissions? In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned Climate), Dr. Magdalena Klemun at the MIT Institute for Data, Systems and Society joins host Laur Hesse Fisher to begin exploring this question, starting with wind and solar power. What exactly are wind and solar power? What challenges do we currently face when trying to use wind and solar to generate most of our electricity? What’s the role of energy storage, and what could our future zero-carbon energy mix look like?

We hear a lot about technologies that produce carbon-free energy, but what about actually using less energy to begin with? In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned Climate), Harvey Michaels, lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, joins host Laur Hesse Fisher to explore the three ways that energy efficiency can help us reduce carbon emissions.

We know how to generate tons of electricity without pumping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, using a technology that’s already mature, widespread, and competitive with fossil fuels—and also, very controversial: nuclear power. In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned Climate), Prof. Jacopo Buongiorno, Director of the MIT Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, sits down with host Laur Hesse Fisher to explore how nuclear power works, why even some climate advocates don’t agree on using it, and what role it can play in our clean energy future.

This season, we’ve talked about alternative energy sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide -- but what if there was a way to continue using fossil fuels for energy without emitting CO2 into the atmosphere? In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned Climate), Dr. Howard Herzog and Professor Brad Hager sit down with host Laur Hesse Fisher to talk about capturing, using, and storing carbon emissions, and how it fits into a clean energy future.

Let’s talk about a technology that could change our whole energy system, but so far hasn’t generated a single watt. In the season finale of TILclimate (Today I Learned Climate), Professor Dennis Whyte sits down with host Laur Hesse Fisher to talk about fusion energy.

Today we bring climate change to the dining room table. In this episode, we reinvited Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig onto the TILclimate podcast to tell us just a little more about the connections between the food we eat and climate change.

Sea level rise is already happening and affecting people right now. We invited Prof. James Renwick back to TILclimate to talk about the near future: what will sea level rise look like for coastal areas in the next 20 or 30 years, and what can we do about it?

Is climate change really a national security issue, in the same way we think about terrorism or nuclear weapons? And if so, what are our governments doing about it? In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate), national security expert Alice C. Hill joins host Laur Hesse Fisher to help answer these questions.

We’ve had people ask us, if climate change is caused by adding too much CO2 into the atmosphere, can’t we just suck it back out? Won’t that solve our climate change problem? In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate), Professor Niall Mac Dowell of Imperial College London joins host Laur Hesse Fisher to demystify the process and feasibility of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

In our last episode, we talked about using technology to suck out extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But you might also be thinking—don’t trees do that? Yeah, they do! In fact, some people have proposed that by planting enough trees, we could make a big dent on climate change. In this episode of TILclimate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Charles Harvey helps us answer the question: could we just plant a whole lot of trees to solve our climate problem?

Over the last fifty years, humans have made remarkable progress in reducing hunger around the world. How can we keep our farms and food system resilient in a warming climate? Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig, Senior Research Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, joins host Laur Hesse Fisher on this episode of TILclimate to explain how climate change is already impacting our global food system.

Today’s episode is about the money of climate change. When people talk about how much it costs to stop climate change, what are we paying for? And who’s paying, exactly? And if we don’t pay to stop climate change – how much will that cost us? To answer these questions, we spoke with Dr. Barbara Buchner from the Climate Policy Initiative.

This 2 week lesson incorporates the CCSS ELA Standards using the Serial podcast, an engaging murder mystery podcast.

Searching as Information Literacy: Unpacking the ACRL Frame of Searching as Strategic Exploration is an OER that includes a podcast, blog and associated exercise. Three University of Ottawa librarians are interviewed on search challenges they have encountered and their proposed search strategies as it relates to the ACRL framework: Searching as Strategic Exploration.

Interview 1: Thinking Outside the Box

Interview 2: Selecting Appropriate and Relevant Search Terms

Interview 3: Rethinking the Value of Google

Created by students in ISI 6372 Information Literacy at the University of Ottawa, Winter 2020.

In this podcast, listen to a traditional Inuit tale about the seasonal light and darkness of the Arctic.