December 29 - Early in 2014 a Dire Warning on Climate Change; A March 31 Interview on the Latest Alarming IPCC Report; Some Hope at the End of the Year From Lima, Peru

Full Program

Part 1

As we approach the New Year we examine one of the stories we have covered this year that is perhaps the most important issue on the planet yet does not dominate the headlines and perhaps only will when it is too late to do anything about it. Today we look into the year’s events in terms of global warming, an inconvenient truth that is largely under-reported or misreported when it comes to the influence of coal, oil and gas-funded global warming deniers in the conservative media and on Capitol Hill. We begin on March the 23^rd 2014 with the new article at Scientific American “Earth Will Cross the Climate-Danger Threshold by 2036” and speak with Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State University about the growing gap between scientific alarm and political action as the planet runs out of time to prevent its own destruction.

Part 2

Then, on March 31^st of 2014 we discuss the release of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report that global warming poses a growing threat to security, food supply and human life, with a warning that the worst is yet to come. Elizabeth Kolbert, a long-time staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” joins us to discuss what can be done to overcome the organized denial of the problem that is thwarting efforts to address an impending global catastrophe.

Part 3

Then finally on December the first, on the eve of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Lima, Peru that produced for the first time a commitment from 190 nations to move off fossil fuels, we spoke with Jeffrey Bury, a Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, about the work he does on the political economy of climate change and glacier recession that is impacting Peru’s water supply following the loss of up to a half of the country’s Cordillera Blanca glaciers.