CBH Talk | Confronting Climate Change Part 2: The Science

Confronting Climate Change is a three-part series that explores one of the most urgent issues of our times. Join leading thinkers, scientists, journalists, and advocates for these vitally important conversations.

Part Two: The Science—Understanding a Changing Planet

Part Two of Confronting Climate Change turns to science, bringing together leading voices to illuminate the realities of global warming and its far-reaching effects on ecosystems and human lives. What do we know with certainty? What are scientists still working to understand? And how are these changes already reshaping the world around us?

Pulitzer Prize–winning author and The New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert joins the conversation, drawing on decades of reporting and writing that has translated complex environmental science into urgent, compelling narratives including her most recent work Life on a Little-Known Planet. She is joined by climate scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt, whose extensive research and leadership across major scientific institutions, including NASA and NOAA, offer a deeply informed perspective on how we study past, present, and future climate change, and how that knowledge is communicated to the public.

The program is moderated by Rebecca Hersher of NPR’s Climate Desk, whose award-winning reporting connects scientific research to the lived realities of extreme weather and a warming world. Together, they explore what the science tells us now and what it demands of us moving forward.

To learn more about register for Part 3 of Confronting Climate Change, click here.

Participants

Elizabeth Kolbert is the bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, Under a White Sky, which was named a top ten book of the year by The Washington Post, and, most recently, Life on a Little-Known Planet. For her work at The New Yorker, where she’s a staff writer, she has received two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

Dr. Gavin Schmidt is a climate scientist working on understanding past, present and potential future climate change. He has over 170 peer-reviewed publications in the area of climate change and was the author of Climate Change: Picturing the Science. He is a fellow of both the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was awarded the inaugural Climate Communication Prize by AGU in 2011. He was a main stage TED speaker in 2014 and his talk has been viewed millions of times. He has worked with the Columbia Climate School, NASA and NOAA. Photo by Davd Ho.

 Rebecca Hersher is a correspondent on NPR's Climate Desk, where she reports on climate science, weather disasters and how humans are adapting to a hotter world. Hersher was part of the NPR team that won the Kavli Science Journalism Award for the series "Beyond the Poles: The far-reaching dangers of melting ice," as well as a Peabody award and an Edward R. Murrow award for coverage of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Her 2019 coverage of climate-driven flash floods also won an Edward R. Murrow award, and she was part of a team that was honored with a 2020 Society of News Design award for multimedia storytelling. She was a finalist for the Daniel Schorr prize, a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting fellow and an NPR Above the Fray fellow, investigating the causes of the suicide epidemic in Greenland.

Confronting Climate Change is presented with generous support from Con Edison.