How Microbes Make and Break the World Around Us | Ep269: David Kirchman

But as you said, climate should be one, two, and three, and the reason I came across your work was because you'd written this book, uh, called Microbes: The Unseen Agents of Climate Change, and that immediately kind of piqued my curiosity and I, I, I read it.

And I have to say, as a lay person, I really appreciated your efforts to make this a b- ... subject that I could understand.

Um, and just tell me then how did you go from this, the concern about the sort of, uh, deoxygenation and, and this focus on marine, uh, organisms to then a full book on climate change and microbes?

In some ways, I mean, dead zones kind of fell right or followed right after, you know, doing a lot of work with oxygen as a tool more than anything.

And then as I- when I finished the Dead Zone book, I kind of stepped back and said, "Well, geez, there's a bigger problem." And you know, of course, even back whenever I started thinking about everyone was talking about climate change, and it occurred to me that, um, there was nothing out there about the role of microbes, uh, biology in general, but especially microbes and thinking about climate change.

So I thought that was a real need for a book about that, that topic.

And, and, and so I, I jumped in and tried to do it.

Right.

So before we get into the depths of this then, I've just, should just say on Cleaning Up, we usually have a, an acronym klaxon, which is if we get too many, too many three letter acronym, four letter acronyms, we have to explain them.

But in this case, this is a field where there are almost no three letter acronyms.

Instead, there are like three and four syllable Latin names, and-

Yeah

...

it, and they're not given a num- a common name.

So in bo- in botany, for example, people who are clever know the everyday word for a flower and they'll know the Latin one.

Here, you literally have to know the Latin and, and it, for me, I find it so hard to keep them in my mind, uh, not being a Latin [laughs] native.

Yeah.

[laughs]

So what I'm gonna ask you to do is I'm gonna have a Latin klaxon, and we're gonna try-

Oh.

[laughs]

... and get you, get you to say things in words that anyone could understand or anyone could remember.

So the more memor- you get prizes for the more memorable, uh, names that you can come up with.

So let's try that.

But first of all, let's just cover off what is a microbe.