SURVIVING CLIMATE CHANGE

Space solar farms, geothermal power and food produced by way of the sky: how revolutionary ideas and advanced technologies might help slow global temperature rises...and save humanity

- Gwynne Dyer

INTERVIEWING 100 climate scientists proper in-depth interviews, two cameras, lights, the lot about the consequences of our warming Earth is a crash course in coping strategies. Most of these men and women are suffering from quiet desperation, because they know what's going to happen and they can't seem to change it.

They feel obliged to sound optimistic, but give them a half hour to talk about it and the sadness and despair start to show.

Over the course of four years, I met with these experts to pose one question as our carbon emissions continue to soar: What else can we do? And to my surprise, I have come away with some hope for the future.

Please don't get carried away with that notion. We're still in the deepest trouble imaginable. But things have got a bit better. Five years ago, everybody was still pretending that we were going to fix everything by cutting greenhouse gas levels.

It was a complete fantasy. Global emissions have not fallen in one single year since Margaret Thatcher first declared global warming a major threat in 1988.

In fact, scientists recently confirmed global concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide - three of the top greenhouse gases humans are responsible for reached record highs last year. Yet the increases were "not quite as high as the record jumps observed in recent years", said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US-run government agency that released the data.