Totally Cooked: The Climate & Weather Podcast

Extreme weather, climate disasters and gendered violence

Join hosts Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick and Iain Strachan as they welcome Professor Sara Davies; professor of international relations at Griffith University and deputy director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (CEVAW). In this episode, the two Sara(h)s explore one of climate science's most confronting intersections: what happens to women's safety when extreme weather strikes. From floods, to heatwaves, to compounding crises, the panel covers how climate change triggers and amplifies gender-based violence. Drawing on research across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Sara reveals that women in those regions weren't shocked by COVID-19's cascading crises: they'd been managing climate, financial and health emergencies simultaneously for years. The episode also unpacks CEVAW's Women's Safety Index (tracking equity, protection and resource indicators across 190 countries), and what it reveals about why some societies recover from shocks faster than others. Who actually carries the practical burden of community recovery after Australian disasters? Why do Indigenous women face rates of violence that constitute a national emergency in their own right? And what can women-led early warning networks in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific can teach high-income countries about disaster preparedness? All questions you can have answered on this insightful look into the intersection of violence, climate, and weather.  Iain records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Bunurong People of the Kulin Nation. Sarah records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging and recognise their unique and continuing connection to the land, skies, waters, plants and animals. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Rescuing Australia's lost weather records

Join hosts Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick and Iain Strachan as they welcome historical climatologist Dr Linden Ashcroft and PhD candidate Ruchit Kulkarni, both from the University of Melbourne. This ep the panel dig through diaries, ship logs and colonial era weather stations in search of Australia's climate before the instrumental record began. What counts as a reliable weather observation from 1830? Why does a reference period matter for understanding today's extremes? And why is the Southern Hemisphere's climate history so much thinner than the Northern Hemisphere's? The episode traces how pre-Bureau of Meteorology data, from convict-era rain gauges to a lighthouse keeper's logbook on Gabo Island are rescued, digitised and quality-checked before it can be trusted. Deadly droughts, time-series analysis, historical data in research and the beauty of stories that stood the test of time and science. All part of this cooked up ep going back in time. So dust off the family diaries and tune in as Totally Cooked goes looking for Australia's climate in the historical record — and asks what two centuries of old numbers can tell us about the droughts and floods still to come. Iain records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Bunurong People of the Kulin Nation. Sarah records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging and recognise their unique and continuing connection to the land, skies, waters, plants and animals. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Cooking up the Climate Stripes, with Ed Hawkins

In this episode of Totally Cooked: The Climate & Weather Podcast, hosts Iain Strachan and Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick sit down with one of the world’s most recognisable climate communicators: Professor Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading. Ed is the climate scientist behind the now-iconic Climate Stripes, a deceptively simple graphic made of blue and red bars that tells the story of global warming at a glance. First published in 2018, the stripes visualise more than a century of rising global temperatures, with each stripe representing the average temperature for a single year and shifting from cooler blues to warmer reds as the planet heats up. The Climate Stripes have travelled far beyond academic journals. Downloaded more than a million times within days of their public release, they’ve appeared everywhere from social media campaigns and fashion to projections on famous landmarks, helping people around the world understand climate change without needing a single axis label or number. In this conversation, Ed explains how the idea emerged from a desire to communicate climate data more clearly, why the stripes resonated so strongly with the public, and how visualisations like the climate spiral (another of his widely shared creations) can make complex science instantly understandable. But this episode goes beyond the stripes. Ed also discusses his research into climate variability and extreme weather, his work with the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science, and the Weather Rescue citizen science project, which recruits volunteers to digitise historical weather records from handwritten archives. Together, these efforts help scientists extend the climate record further into the past, giving us a clearer picture of how quickly our climate is changing, and why communicating that change effectively matters more than ever. Iain records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Bunurong People of the Kulin Nation. Sarah records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging and recognise their unique and continuing connection to the land, skies, waters, plants and animals. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

How is climate change impacting our cities, and why is Indonesia moving its capital?

Cities are where so many of us really experience climate change. They’re where heatwaves keep us awake at night, where flash floods turn streets into rivers, and where concrete, glass and asphalt can reshape the weather around us. As more than half of humanity now lives in urban areas, the story of climate change is increasingly a story about cities - how they amplify extremes, how they trap heat, and how smart planning might help protect the people who call them home. In this episode of Totally Cooked, Sarah and Iain are joined by Associate Professor Negin Nazarian, and PhD student Ressy Fitria. They're hitting the streets to explore the science of urban climate. What exactly is an urban heat island? Do cities just experience climate change, or do they actually modify the climate themselves? And how well are our climate models capturing the complexity of real neighbourhoods?  We’ll also head to Indonesia, where a brand new capital city is rising in tropical Borneo. As Jakarta sinks and sea levels rise, Nusantara is being billed as a 'smart forest city' built for the future. But what happens to heat, humidity and extreme weather when you replace tropical forest with high-density urban development? And can we truly design cities that work with the climate, rather than against it?  Iain records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Bunurong People of the Kulin Nation. Sarah records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging and recognise their unique and continuing connection to the land, skies, waters, plants and animals. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Who pays for climate damage? Extreme weather attribution and Loss & Damage

In this episode, Sarah and Iain are joined by Dr Joyce Kimutai, climate attribution scientist at Imperial College London and member of World Weather Attribution (WWA), to unpack one of the most consequential fields in climate science. Joyce explains the world of attribution - quantifying how much human-induced climate change has altered the likelihood or intensity of specific extreme weather events. From the relatively straightforward case of heat waves, where the signal of climate change is now essentially guaranteed, to the far thornier problem of attributing localised flooding in data-sparse regions, the conversation covers both the power and the limits of the science. Joyce illustrates what it means to do attribution science in regions where weather station networks are sparse, records are inconsistent, and data-sharing policies can block access entirely. The show covers why satellite proxies and reanalysis products are not always a reliable substitute when the underlying observations are missing. From all things Loss & Damage, litigation meeting climate science, the use of observations, and the unlikely and unique path that brought Joyce into the field, jump into the world of attribution for this episode. Iain records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Bunurong People of the Kulin Nation. Sarah records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging and recognise their unique and continuing connection to the land, skies, waters, plants and animals. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.