Paul Beckwith on a climate out of control

They Drove Off the Climate Cliff

Radio Ecoshock,

15 March, 2017

Climate scientist Paul Beckwith says we are already off the cliff, falling into dangerous climate change. We get new science and the big picture. Then hear best-selling author Caleb Warnock on the new drive to grow your own… food. He’s got a garden out there in the Utah winter, with no heat.

Hey there, here is another mind-rocking show for you. This week, I got hammered by some awful news from some great climate science, so I took my troubles to University of Ottawa climate scientist Paul Beckwith. We get a cutting edge education.

Then we’ll try and heal with real food you can grow yourself. Our guest Caleb Warnock is a best-selling author. He’ll tell us how humans fed themselves without fossil fuels for centuries. We hear how to grow food year-round including cold winters and summers made hotter by global warming.

Take the green way out, with Radio Ecoshock.

TRACKING THE BIG PICTURE WITH SCIENTIST PAUL BECKWITH

We read relentless headlines about our planet heading out of control. Most of them seem to cruise by without hurting us. Yeah, yeah, half the mammals will be extinct soon. The oceans are dying.  Scientists declare Earth a toxic planet.  Wait – did somebody say it’s going to be too hot to hold outdoor music festivals? That’s terrible! I love those!

My theory is we all have triggers and breaking points, especially when it comes to climate change news. A couple of mine arrived this week. Now I’m freaked out, again.  That means it’s time to call our Radio Ecoshock regular correspondent, University of Ottawa scientist Paul Beckwith. Paul teaches climate science at the University. He also teaches it to the world via his many You tube videos.

No doubt we’re all going to need a climate help line pretty soon. When we get worried, we call up and get a climate counselor. How about you, do you get freaked out by the climate news sometimes?  There have been recent studies showing more and more people are feeling climate stress. We don’t need science to watch this all happening, literally in our backyards. For example, in this year of 2017, the city of Chicago had no snow in January and February. That’s got to be pretty crazy for people who know the Great Lakes winters.

OK, here is my first personal trigger. I’m minding my own business, cruising through gardening videos, and a listener sends me a story by journalist Nafeez Ahmed. He says new science suggests we could experience a burst of warming within the next 5 years. I had problems getting my usual garden plants to survive the strange hot May and June we had last year. The US National Weather Service says this coming spring will be even hotter. It’s going to be a struggle to garden. I ask Paul: could we see an even worse jolt in heating, something we haven’t seen before, within the next five years?

The paper stimulating Ahmed’s article at vice.com was published back in 2015 with the title “Quantifying the likelihood of a continued hiatus in global warming“.

Considering we’ve just experienced hotter and hotter – what would a jump in warming look like for the rest of us? Food? Deaths? How hot? Paul Beckwith, what are we gambling with here?

I began by moaning about personal triggers, where the news gets too real. Judging by one of Paul’s recent videos, I’m thinking he hit one too. I’m talking about stories that billionaires expect to get away from climate collapse by building bunkers in the Southern Hemisphere, in places like New Zealand. Maybe we’ll all head to New Zealand. What’s wrong with that logic? It turns out the whole world is connected, and there is no safe place to hide from a climate calamity. My apologies to listeners in Australia, who already know this.

Find Paul’s video “Southern Hemisphere Is No Haven From Abrupt Climate Change” here.