Our last guest today, John Cook, Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne

Do Middle‑earth and Westeros make sense? Climate scientists modelled them to find out….

https://theconversation.com/do-middle-earth-and-westeros-make-sense-climate-scientists-modelled-them-to-find-out-277232

“For a world to be truly immersive and believable, readers apply what is known as the “principle of minimal departure”. This assumes anything not explicitly magical, such as a planet’s weather or gravity, must adhere to the laws of the real world.

In this spirit of rigorous worldbuilding, we just published a new study where we merged the disparate disciplines of literary worldbuilding and climate modelling.

We used complex computer programs – the same ones used to forecast Earth’s future warming scenarios – to simulate the climates of famous fantasy settings such as Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the continents of Westeros in the Game of Thrones, and the far-future Earth in The Wheel of Time series. We also built a model for a fictional world developed by one of us.”

John Cook is a research assistant professor at the Centre for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. He has a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Western Australia. He founded Skeptical Science, a website which won the 2011 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge and 2016 Friend of the Planet Award from the National Centre for Science Education. J

ohn co-authored the college textbooks Climate Change: Examining the Facts with Weber State University professor Daniel Bedford. He was also a co-author of the textbook Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis and the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. In 2013, he published a paper analysing the scientific consensus on climate change that has been highlighted by President Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron. In 2015, he developed a Massive Open Online Course at the University of Queensland on climate science denial, that has received over 25,000 enrolments.

He currently co-hosts a podcast Evidence Squared on the science of science communication

The post Sat, 21st March, 2026: John Cook, Snr Research Fellow, School of Psychological Sciences, MelbUni; Do Middle‑earth and Westeros Make Sense? appeared first on Saturday Magazine.