Confronting Climate Change

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Wisconsin Public Radio

Prx, Philosophy, Knowledge, Wpr, Ttbook, Wisconsin, Society & Culture

4.7 • 844 Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2015

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Rising sea levels, brutal storms and droughts, record temperatures...is there anything we can do about climate change? As world leaders gather at the Paris Climate Summit, we consider a range of proposals - from geoengineering and new green technology to a post-carbon economy. Capitalism vs. the Climate; Modern Monkeywrenching; Is Nuclear Power the Answer?; Geoengineering 101; Al Gore's Optimism; Questioning our Growth Fetish; Finding Hope in the Age of Climate Change.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Support for WPR comes from Luther College in Decora, Iowa, offering more than 60 areas of study,
0:06.7	including new majors in data science and neuroscience, dedicated to preparing students for a changing world.
0:13.2	Luther.edu.
0:18.4	It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. Political leaders from around the world are in Paris, talking about climate change.
0:26.6	Islands disappearing, houses sliding off cliffs, brutal storms and floods in some places, drought and heat in others.
0:35.6	The thing is, at this point, is there really much anyone can do to make a
0:40.6	difference? In this hour, activists, scientists, and environmentalists will share some ideas,
0:46.8	beginning with journalist Naomi Klein. She's the author of the best-selling book, This Changes Everything,
0:52.7	Capitalism versus the Climate. She's in Paris right now covering
0:56.5	the climate summit, and she told Steve Paulson that global warming is an increasingly urgent problem.
1:02.8	For a long time, climate change was like this grandchildren problem. But that's really changing.
1:07.4	I mean, we are experiencing the impacts of climate change in the here
1:11.1	and now. It's gone from being this grandchildren problem to being a banging down our door problem
1:16.4	pretty rapidly. And that is changing the discussion because of people's lived experience with
1:21.0	extreme weather. And yet we're still denying. And I think we're denying in this sense of,
1:26.3	you know, looking away, right? So we're living with this cognitive dissonance of, on the one hand, being told and indeed experiencing the reality of climate change in these moments. And on the other hand, living in a culture that is sending us the opposite message through the policies that are all around us and the culture that's all around us.
1:45.2	So we look away. So how much urgency is there here? I mean, let's talk about possible scenarios.
1:51.5	If the global temperature goes up 2 degrees Celsius, which is what 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit, something like that,
1:58.2	or 4 degrees Celsius, which is within the forecast,
2:02.4	what will happen?
2:03.7	So where we're at is we are currently on the road towards 4 to 6 degrees warming, 4 to 6 degrees Celsius.
2:12.4	So on the high end, around 10.7 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels. That's a lot of warming. And these
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Wisconsin Public Radio, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Wisconsin Public Radio and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.