Jun 17 2024 33 mins
Climate change(aka global warming)and warming denial– human-engineered and accelerating at a rapid clip–have been on display in America for at least 4 decades, dating back to when then Vice President Al Gore shared with us “An Inconvenient Truth.” Scientists were aware of what our industrial and consumer advances–electricity, gas guzzling cars and growing use of fossil fuels–would mean to the planet over time as carbon dioxide was trapped in the atmosphere, generating the greenhouse gases which vex us today. While scientists were developing a consensus about the problem, dogged deniers, many of whom were the merchants of doubt who sold us cigarettes as being good for our health, attacked the science. Their hi jinx brought us “Climate Gate” and have been successful(if we want to call it that)in influencing public opinion to this day. Their efforts make tackling the issue a lower priority than many other more temporal issues, thus the creating political inertia limiting efforts to mitigate it. In his masterpiece of a book, our guest, David Lipsky, author of “The Parrot and the Igloo” gives us much to laugh and cry about as he tells a history so little told or understood in this time of climate weirdness. Now that fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and heat make the reality inescapable, what will we do? David was so interesting and entertaining we offer you a rare two-part podcast.