N/B: Owing to a ridiculously hectic schedule until the end of the year, episodes will continue to be released on a fortnightly basis until further notice - thanks for understanding.  We hear an awful lot about carbon capture, utilisation, and storage as a technology that could help to mitigate climate change. In this episode, we review the science, the policy, existing CCS plants, and the potential for the captured carbon to be utilised. Will CCS ever materialise?

Physical Attraction

Climate 201: NETS V: Carbon Capture, Utilisation, and Storage

In this episode, we get into some of the specific technologies that might be called upon to deliver negative emissions at scale. Specifically, we're looking at the advantages, disadvantages, and concerns surrounding BECCS (Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage.)

Climate 201: Negative Emissions IV: Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS)

In this episode, we discuss whether the promises that some new technology - like negative emissions - will come along and "solve climate change" for us are genuine, or if they have instead shaped climate policy into prevarication and procrastination.

Climate 201, Negative Emissions III: Technological Promises, or Prevarications

Increasing levels of negative emissions are envisioned by models in climate-change scenarios that are compatible with the Paris Agreements. In this episode, we talk about some of the geopolitical implications for trying to deliver this, and the alternative futures that we can envision. Do "thinly-veiled techno-utopias shore up the Paris Agreement?"

Climate 201: Negative Emissions (II): We'll Always Have Paris?

Negative emissions technologies (NETs), also called carbon dioxide removal (CDR), are seen by many as an increasingly essential part of climate change mitigation. Many of the scenarios that the IPCC suggests for meeting the Paris Agreement goals suggest that we will suck billions of tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere by the end of the century - using technology which has barely made it past the pilot project stage. In this episode, I ask: how did we get here?

Climate 201: Negative Emissions I: The Last Thing We Should Be Talking About?

The book club returns, with a two-part review and overview of anthropologist Jason Hickel's book "The Divide", about global inequality, its historical origins, and possible solutions in the future.

Book Club: Jason Hickel's The Divide, Part II

Book Club: Jason Hickel's The Divide, Part I: The Origins of Global Inequality

In this episode, we discuss the ongoing battle throughout the 1930s and 1940s between those who believed in a steady-state Universe, and those who thought it was expanding - and how it took more observations to overcome these cosmological contradictions.

Cosmology, VII: Cosmological Contradictions

To close out this series of news episodes, we discuss the depressing failure of carbon capture and storage projects in Australia, as well as the far-too-slow approach to climate change adaptation across the world.

TT: Climate, CCS Struggles as Adaptation Stalls

In this episode of Thermonuclear Takes, we tackle a couple of recent climate-related news stories - the "tipping point" carbon flux measurements from the Amazon rainforest, and the IEA's progress report on a global green recovery.

Thermonuclear Takes: Amazon Carbon Stocks and Global Green Recovery Progress Update

Updates on the Softbank Vision Fund and the sad fate of Pepper the robot.

Thermonuclear Takes: The Little Robot That Couldn't

In this news episode, I discuss recent anomalies around the muon - B-particles decaying into muons, and the muon's anomalous magnetic moment - and whether they herald the glorious dawn of a new era of physics, or are just a mistake.

Thermonuclear Takes: Muon Madness Melting Models... Maybe?

In this news-y episode, I will give you some updates on how the show is progressing, share some listener emails on our cosmology series, and set up next episode's discussion of some recent results in high-energy physics.

Thermonuclear Takes: Show updates, cosmology feedback, particle physics

In this episode, we cover the different kinds of universal horizon, whether the Universe has an edge, and talk about how theoretical physicists pondered how it all might've began.

Cosmology VI: Cosmic Eggs and the Edge of the Universe

At the dawn of theoretical cosmology, Einstein introduced the so-called "Cosmological Constant" into his equations to explain how the Universe could be static and unchanging in time. He would later say that it was his greatest mistake.

Cosmology, Episode V: Einstein's Mistake

Physical Attraction is the show that tries to explain physics... one chat-up line at a time. So whether you're trying to seduce a physicist, or you're a physicist that needs help with seduction, we're here for you. Submit questions on Twitter to @physicspod

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Physical Attraction

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