Hot Mess

Climate and weather are not the same thing. But climate change is making extreme weather events even more extreme. How do scientists pick apart how much stronger a storm is or how much hotter a heat wave is due to climate change and global warming? Guest host Adam Levy talks to Dr Fredi Otto to find out.

Climate Fiction comes in all sorts of forms, there’s your Mad Maxes, your Games of Thrones, your Parables of the Sowers, and your WALL-Es. But are Cli-Fi books, movies, and TV shows just capitalizing on a hot topic, or do they actually change people’s perceptions of climate change? Lindsay Ellis, of It’s Lit, and Amy Brady, the editor-in-chief of The Chicago Review of Books, help us find out.

The way we eat is unsustainable for the climate. Our food system contributes a massive amount of greenhouse gas emissions and touches basically every facet of our life. The answer is pretty simple on paper: We need to convert more of our diet to plant-based foods, and away from red meat. But in practice? It’s nowhere near that easy.

The conventional wisdom on how to talk about climate change and inspire people to do something about it has always been "don't scare people". At least until recently. In the past couple years climate scientists and climate journalists have started talking in scarier and more worst case terms than ever before. Why? And is this a good thing? I talked to author David Wallace-Wells to learn more.

Climate guilt is a common feeling. We’ve all benefited from fossil fuels, and most of the stuff we do in life depends on them. But we also know that we can’t continue down this path if we want to live in a stable world. So how do we overcome this challenge? How do we make a change? We talked to Hank Green to get his thoughts.

What can a bunch of circles and squares from a 19th century novella tell us about Climate Change? It's metaphor time!

Say you’re looking to buy a car. How do you pick the best car for the planet? There’s already a lot to consider when choosing a new ride, and factoring in climate change makes it even trickier. Well we’re here to guide you through it… even if we can’t come to the dealership with you.

Talking about climate change is hard. Not talking about climate change is easy. But if we want to keep our planet livable then we have to do the hard thing and not the easy thing. But how do we do the hard thing? I asked some of my favorite creator friends to help me figure that out.

Clothing is something we have to think about every day, but we don’t always think about how our clothes impact the planet. Fashion designers like Justine Leconte are transforming the industry by creating sustainable, ethical clothing and showing everyone that fashion can be about more than having the latest trends.

Carbon dioxide gets a lot of grief these days. It’s the main cause of the global warming that’s already damaging coral reefs, ice caps, and coastlines. But for eons, life survived on Earth because natural processes kept CO2 levels within limits, preventing the planet from getting either too cold or too hot.

Today, lawsuits are positioning climate change as this generation's smoking: it pollutes the air, it’s caused by burning chemicals we buy from a handful of huge companies, and it’s dangerous to human health. Fossil fuel companies are being taken to court just like tobacco companies were, because of what they knew and when. Should they be forced to pay for damages from climate change?

Georgetown, TX is a conservative city in the middle of oil and gas country that’s committed to 100% renewable energy, and we could learn a lot from them.

By the end of 2016 in the U.S., over 1 million homes had solar panels, with four times as many installed that year compared to just four years earlier. But if you don’t own the roof over your head, or can’t afford this kind of upgrade, are you left out of the solar energy revolution?

Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the seafloor, and yet they’re home to a quarter of all marine life, making them some of the most biodiverse places on Earth. But their future looks bleak. Decades of environmental threats like warming waters and ocean acidification have pushed reefs to the brink. Can we use science to bring them back?

Energy efficiency standards have quietly been saving people mountains of money and helping avoid planet-warming emissions at the same time.

Deforestation is a big problem for the climate. This kind of land use releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any single country, besides the United States or China. And most of the deforestation in the world today happens because people want to put farms where forests are. So, figuring out how to farm with trees instead of just chopping them down could help us fight climate change.

About half the world has internet access. That’s 3.6 billion people surfing the web. How much energy is that using? And what is our online world doing to our planet’s climate?

As the world figures out how to live with a rapidly changing climate, traditional knowledge from indigenous cultures could help us understand just how things are transforming.

Imagine that aliens landed and gifted us a clean, limitless energy source. Instead of killing each other over this technology, we decided to transform the world into a carbon-free society. This wondrous source would power our homes, industries, cars and planes, and humanity’s annual rate of carbon pollution would almost instantly fall to zero. What would that mean for global warming?

Thanks to climate change, disease carrying critters are expanding their ranges, and their seasons are getting longer -- meaning they have more space and more time to take a bite out of you or me.