In January 2021, Travis Bradford was welcoming the latest group of students to his Energy Markets and Innovation class, which he’d been teaching at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs since 2012. Bradford started class by asking everyone to introduce themselves. “It’s notable when a guy stands up and says, ‘I’m a professional comedian,’” he recalls. “It was the first and last time anyone has done that.” That guy was Rollie Williams, a student who had already made a name for himself on the New York comedy scene playing Al Gore in his sketch show “An Inconvenient Talk Show” at a club on the Lower East Side beginning in 2018. Williams had been trying to make it as a NYC comedian for five years when he created the show, in which Gore goes on an I-told-you-so tour about climate change and interviews real scientists onstage. Although he had majored in biochemistry and theater at the University of Puget Sound, Williams had never considered bringing science into his stand-up. But after years of late-night sets to empty seats, Williams was taken aback by the success of his climate-based comedy. “The actual ‘aha!’ moment was that people came to the show,”...

Imagine a mountain so remote that for centuries, it has served as a sanctuary, untouched by the industrial heartbeat of the cities below.

Real-time water temperature at California's offshore buoys, compared with each buoy's 1991–2020 climatology.

For millennia, the Earth has danced to the rhythm of the Milankovitch cycles, a celestial waltz of orbital shifts that dictates the timing of our ice ages.