Jenny McElwain

speaker

162 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2 Jul

Jenny McElwain’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

In Our Time · The Evolution of Trees · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

and oxygen levels were increased.

So about 300 million years ago, we had this peak in oxygen.

It could have been higher than 25% oxygen, even 30% oxygen, so much higher than today.

So partly, I think any of the carbon in our fossil fuels, so coal, oil, is the remnant of photosynthesis from millions of years ago.

Yeah, so we're burning...

I think carbon that was stored millions of years ago and took millions of years to store and we're releasing it rapidly into the atmosphere.

We can do that, but I don't think we can give you the answer yes.

I think everybody's trying, but we're not there yet.

But I think we have to, as scientists, use all the tools possible.

So again, going back to paleobotany, what we can do is I think we can look at the rich fossil history of Britain and Ireland and look at what trees, what species were growing 2 million years ago or 25 million years ago when we know

The climate was similar to our climate future.

So we're kind of going back.

We're going, I can't even think where we're going, but we're going into our futures more similar to the warm climates of the past.

For example, in Ireland, the west coast of Ireland, Connemara, two million years ago, we had pecans.

We had Japanese umbrella pine that's today only found in Japan.

And then if you go further back 25 million years ago, the whole of Northern Ireland, Northern Britain was covered in swamp cypress.

And these trees are, you find them today in Alabama and the bayous of America.

And they're extinct from Europe today.

I suppose it gives me a lot of hope that there, you know, I kind of said, well, we don't know what's resilient, but we know that biology is incredibly resilient.

Bill's given us wonderful examples and it's amazing how rapidly things can adapt to their environments.

Showing 101–120 of 162 · page 6 of 9