'Dire Predictions' and the human face of climate change

A discussion with Dire Predictions author and meteorology professor Michael Mann and researcher Andrea Milan who studies modern human migration patterns.

Carbon fingerprint

"We know the CO2 that's building up in the atmosphere, it is building up at an unprecedented rate. It's higher now than it's been in millions of years," Mann said. "It's suggestive that we're the culprit. When we measure the CO2 that's building up in the atmosphere, we can see that it is the result of fossil fuel burning."

The Anthropocene era

"Our impact on the planet is so profound that it is on par with the great geological periods of the past; the Cretaceous, the Jurassic," Mann said.

"But this period didn't emerge over millions of years, this period we created over less than a 1,000 years and arguably the true emergence of the Anthropocene is really over the past century. We are having such a profound impact on the planet that we put the Earth into a new geological period on a timescale of centuries while nature has taken millions of years to do that."

The human face of climate change

Andrea Milan also joined the conversation at the end of the hour to discuss how climate change is influencing armed conflict and migration patterns around the world.