The conventional wisdom when i went to antarctica was still that climate changed at a stately, long term pace. There were signs that something was happening in the west antarctic ice sheet. And so what you saw was a transition in the climate science community from understanding that climate change was way off in the future and was going to be slow to understanding that it could be quite rapid.
Author and environmental journalist Eugene Linden's new book, Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change from 1979 to the Present, lays out how successive US governments managed to delay action on climate change when they should have been raising the alarm. It also looks at why the climate emergency will have a big impact on the global economy and why China and India, which could have taken a lead on renewables, double downed on coal to fuel their industrialisation in the 1990s. Our host for the podcast is the economist and broadcaster Linda Yueh.
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