What To Do About Climate Change?

2012 has seen drought, wildfire, ice-melt, Sandy, and 70-degree temps in Chicago in December.  What are we going to do about climate change?

In the first decade of the 21st Century, a lot of Americans checked out on climate change. Wandered off. Doubted. Ignored it. But not now. The last couple of years — and this year in particular — of heat and drought and crop loss and wildfire and ice melt and coastal flooding have got people's attention in a way that overwhelming majorities of scientists never could.

Hurricane Sandy put miles of New York City underwater. On the south side of Chicago this week, in December, it was 72 degrees. Weather isn't climate, but weather makes it real.

This hour, On Point: urgency and climate change.
-Tom Ashbrook

Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center of Georgetown University Law Center where she is also a Visiting Professor.

Anthony Leiserowitz, research scientist, lecturer, and director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

New York Times "The last three United Nations climate changesummit meetings have been disorderly affairs, marked by brinkmanship, breakdowns and a weary sense that there has to be a better way to address the intensifying challenge of a simmering planet."

Greenwire "With the U.S. intelligence budget shrinking, the CIA has quietly shut down its Center on Climate Change and National Security — a project that was launched with the support of Leon Panetta when he led the agency, but that drew sharp criticism from some Republicans in Congress."

Associated Press "The Middle East and North Africa will be especially hard hit by climate change in the coming decades, the World Bank said in a report Wednesday, saying the region will see less rainfall, more recording-breaking temperatures and rising sea levels."