Vidéos

Climate scientists are clear that it’s already too late to go back to the kind of weather we used to have, but can we stop things from getting a whole lot worse? Professor Michael E Mann – from Penn State university in the United States – and author of ‘The New Climate War’ explains the radical change needed to avert catastrophic temperature rises.

In the summer of 1995, Chicago experienced the deadliest heat wave in American history. Streets buckled, power grids failed, and when the heat finally broke, more than 700 people were dead. The questions of why so many people perished, and why their deaths were so easy to deny, ignore, or forget, preoccupied Eric Klinenberg. He uncovered unsettling forms of social breakdown – the isolation of seniors, the abandonment of poor neighborhoods, and the retrenchment of public assistance programs – which led him to write "Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago." Drawing on his experience as research director for the federal Rebuild By Design competition after Superstorm Sandy, he also discovered that global warming makes these issues all the more dangerous and argues that cities must adapt, or face worse incidents in the future.