Are We On The Verge Of A Climate Apocalypse That Will Wipe Out Humanity?

This month, former Vice President Al Gore has a new film out about climate change — and the effort to fight it. His film is well timed — it follows New York magazine’s July article asserting that “absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.” That’s a terrifying message — but is it necessary and is it accurate? Is our planet on an irreversible path to apolcalypse? On this episode, I talk to Michael Mann, the renowned climatologist who is the director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. He has been sounding the alarm about climate change for years, but he also has also argued that there is “a danger in overstating the science in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness.”