Heat Of The Moment: Inside Out is a one-hour, news-friendly special report from WBUR’s award-winning Inside Out Documentaries. It comes just as the world prepares for the most important meeting on climate change in a decade, starting on December 7th, in Copenhagen.
This thorough, sound-rich program gives listeners a firsthand sense of the human costs of global warming right now, and a look at the future from the perspective of the world’s leading climate-change experts. The listeners’ experience will be enhanced by the program’s website, http://www.insideout.org, and an accompanying website on climate change produced by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, http://www.turninguptheheat.net.
Most people think of climate change as a gradual warming of Earth’s atmosphere. They are wrong in two respects. First, it is not “gradual.” Scientists see Earth’s warming as startlingly rapid in the context of geologic time. Second, there’s much more to climate change than warming. There’s sea level rise, disruptive changes in weather patterns, and intensification of existing weather extremes. To millions of people around the world, these impacts of global warming have already begun, and are becoming increasingly severe.
In Heat Of The Moment: Inside Out, science journalist Daniel Grossman takes us to places where the effects of climate change are acutely felt:
- Paris: The August 2003 heat wave killed 40,000 people across Europe. Why did Parisians suffer disproportionately, and what measures are being taken to protect the population in the heat waves to come?
- India & Bangladesh: These low-lying coastlines, home to hundreds of millions, are threatened not only by rising sea levels, but also by more intense storms, flooding, erosion. How can these relatively poor but fast-growing nations cope with loss of habitat and arable land, and confront issues of food security and environmental migration?
- South Africa: Global warming is intensifying drought in this already dry country. What will become of the large number of subsistence farmers as water supplies dwindle? Is there a scientific solution in crops genetically engineered to withstand drought?
Daniel Grossman’s previous Inside Out Documentary, “Meltdown: Inside Out,” received the 2008 Science Journalism award from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.
[Grossman did] an outstanding job of reporting the science of global warming in ice sheets, mountain glaciers and sea ice. — Mary Knudson, The Johns Hopkins University.
AVAILABLE: PRX, Content Depot, and CD
Daniel Grossman has been a print journalist and radio and web producer for 20 years. He has produced radio stories and documentaries on science and the environment for National Public Radio’s show Weekend Edition; Public Radio International’s show on the environment, Living on Earth, and news magazine, The World. He has written for the New York Times, The Boston Globe, Discover, Audubon and Scientific America
