I'm Christopher Leiden and this is open source in Climate Week 2024 with the indispensable independent activist and authority Bill McKibbin.

We catch you packing in Vermont, Bill, for not your first climate rodeo in New York.

What's this flavor of 2024 in this history?

Well, I mean, 2024 is... in this

fascinating year in lots and lots of ways.

Really the last 18 months have begun to represent a new phase, a new breaking point in the climate story.

You'll recall that, because we talked about it at the time, that I wrote the first book about all of this back in 1989.

And I interviewed you about it.

And I've been hard at work in a sense on this problem ever since.

I've probably written more words than anybody else in the English

language about this problem which given the temperature of the earth makes me the least

successful writer and activist there ever was. But we've kept it up and built movements and in a sense waited. The temperature has been steadily increasing and so has the damaged whole but really beginning

about January of 2023 so a little more than 18 months ago things started I think think, going on a new trajectory. I started getting calls

from oceanographer friends of mine around the world saying, take a look at the chart of ocean temperatures because they've begun to spike.

They'd been going up steadily, but suddenly they were spiking and indeed by June of

2023 we had the highest temperatures we've ever recorded at sea.

There were a series of buoys off the Florida Keys recording ocean temperatures of

101 degrees Fahrenheit, which is more or less where you'd put your hot tub.

And that heat was quickly moving over land to the hottest weeks of the year every year,

Chris, are the weeks around the solstice

in the northern hemisphere,

because there's more landmass in the northern hemisphere

...