A Climate Time Capsule (Part 1): The Start of the International Climate Change Fight

Short Wave

NPR

Science, Life Sciences, News, Nature, Daily News, Astronomy

4.7 • 6.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2022

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

In 1992, diplomats and scientists at the United Nations negotiated the first-ever treaty intended to tackle the scientific phenomenon now known as climate change. This brought the issue to the forefront and led to a series of conferences that would occur almost every year for the next 30 years.

Short Wave host Emily Kwong talks to freelance climate reporter, Dan Charles, about how those at the conference wrote a clear and ambitious goal that they didn't even fully understand.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to shortwave from NPR.
0:04.6	Hey shortwavers, Emily Kwong here with a voice that should be very familiar to you.
0:10.1	We've Dan Charles here.
0:11.4	He's a longtime correspondent for NPR, now freelance reporter.
0:15.3	Dan, how's life as a self-made story machine?
0:18.4	I wish I felt like a machine, Emily.
0:20.7	It's more like a distracted dog chasing squirrels, you know, the squirrels being stories.
0:26.7	There's a lot of, you know, story acorns out there to gather.
0:31.0	And one of them is this kind of time capsule moment you've found from when the world was
0:37.3	first coming to grips with climate change.
0:40.5	Right.
0:41.5	What happened was I was sitting in Glasgow, Scotland, November 2021 in the press center
0:47.7	at this big international climate summit organized by the U.N.
0:51.4	Yeah, you called us from Glasgow.
0:53.5	I did. There were thousands of people at this meeting diplomats from all over the world
0:57.8	were haggling over global goals for cutting greenhouse emissions.
1:02.3	These meetings happen almost every year actually.
1:04.3	They've been going on for the last 30 years.
1:06.6	30 years.
1:07.6	So international actors have been trying to solve this problem for basically my entire life.
1:11.8	Yeah, and just half of my life, Emily.
1:14.8	Sure we are.
	...

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