Chris Hedges interviews Dahr Jamail on the cliamte emergency

On Contact: Climate emergency with Dahr Jamail

The glaciers in Alaska alone are losing an estimated 75 billion tons of ice every year. The oceans, which absorb over 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, are warming and acidifying, melting the polar ice caps and resulting in rising sea levels and oxygen-starved ocean dead zones. 

We await a 50-gigaton burp, or “pulse,” of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which will release about 2/3 of the total carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial era. 

Some 150 to 200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal are going extinct every 24 hours, 1000 times the “natural” or “background” rate. This pace of extinction is greater than anything the world has experienced since the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. 

Chris Hedges speaks to journalist and author Dahr Jamail about his new book The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption and the climate emergency.