When we talk about climate change, we usually look up. But some of Earth’s most powerful climate controls are moving far below our feet.

In this episode of The Climate Translation, Dr. Mac explores the planet’s deep-sea conveyor belt, part of the slow, geological carbon cycle that has helped regulate Earth’s temperature for billions of years. He explains how ocean sediments, tectonic plates, and volcanic processes quietly move carbon in and out of the atmosphere over immense spans of time.

The key translation is speed. While Earth’s natural carbon system works on million-year timelines, human activity is releasing buried carbon in mere decades. Understanding this contrast helps explain why today’s warming is overwhelming systems that were never built to respond this fast, and why cutting emissions matters more than trying to out-engineer geology.

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“Nature will adapt” sounds reassuring, but what if the problem isn’t resilience, but speed?

In this episode of The Climate Translation, Dr. Mac examines how plants and animals respond to climate change, and why many are failing to keep up. He explains how adaptation, migration, and evolution actually work, and why modern warming is happening far faster than biology is designed to handle.

Using clear analogies and real-world examples, this episode explores the growing barriers wildlife faces: fragmented landscapes, mistimed seasons, and hard physiological limits that no amount of resilience can overcome. The result is a planet that has become a high-stakes obstacle course, where survival increasingly depends on how fast conditions are changing, not how tough nature is.

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Earth stays livable not by accident, but through a delicate balance of energy moving in and out of the atmosphere.

In this episode of The Climate Translation, Dr. Mac breaks down what greenhouse gases actually do, and why they function less like a “blanket” and more like a planetary thermostat. Using clear analogies and familiar comparisons, he explains why some gases affect temperature while others don’t, how small changes in atmospheric chemistry can have outsized effects, and why balance matters more than simple labels like “good” or “bad.”

This episode helps clarify common misconceptions about the greenhouse effect, explains why Earth sits between the extremes of Mars and Venus, and gives listeners practical language for explaining climate physics clearly, calmly, and accurately to others.

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Greenland isn’t just a place on the map. It’s where climate change is unfolding in real time.

In this episode of The Climate Translation, Dr. Mac moves beyond graphs and models to explore Greenland, the world’s largest island and the single biggest contributor to global sea-level rise. He explains how Greenland’s massive ice sheet works, why it’s melting faster than scientists once expected, and how that loss ripples outward, affecting ocean circulation, weather patterns, and coastal communities around the world.

But this is also a human story. From Inuit communities losing their frozen highways to unexpected new farming opportunities, Greenland reveals the complex, often uncomfortable reality of a warming planet, and why what happens there doesn’t stay there.

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It’s one of the most famous, and controversial, graphs in climate science. But what does the “Hockey Stick” actually show?

In this episode of The Climate Translation, Dr. Mac unpacks the iconic temperature graph that illustrates how Earth’s climate changed slowly for centuries before accelerating dramatically in the modern era. He explains how scientists reconstruct past temperatures using natural “proxies” like tree rings, ice cores, and ocean sediments, and why multiple, independent lines of evidence all point to the same conclusion.

Along the way, Dr. Mac breaks down the controversy surrounding the graph, why claims that it was “debunked” persist, and how understanding rate of change helps explain why today’s warming is fundamentally different from the past.

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If nearly all climate scientists agree, why does it still feel like a 50/50 debate?

In this episode of The Climate Translation, Dr. Mac breaks down what scientific consensus actually means, and why it’s so often misunderstood or misrepresented in public conversations about climate change. Using clear analogies and real-world examples, he explains how consensus forms in science, why outliers get outsized attention, and how a handful of “celebrity skeptics” can distort public perception.

This episode gives you the tools to recognize false balance, understand why expert agreement matters, and talk more confidently about climate science without turning the conversation into a fight.

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We live in a world overflowing with climate data, so why does it still feel so hard to believe what’s happening?

In this inaugural episode of The Climate Translation, Dr. Mac explores the disconnect between overwhelming scientific evidence and our very human difficulty processing change at a planetary scale. Drawing on decades of experience as a meteorologist and educator, he breaks down why terms like “parts per million” and “global averages” fail to resonate, and how simple analogies can make the science finally click.

From ice cores to dinner-table conversations, this episode lays the foundation for understanding not just what the climate data says, but why it so often gets lost along the way.

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