Guest: Mark Hertsgaard, investigative reporter who has worked for more than 20 years on climate change. He is the environmental correspondent for The Nation magazine. His new book is Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.

Excerpt from the discussion:

MARK HERTSGAARD:  I was interviewing David King, the chief science adviser of the British government. And all the time I had been covering this issue during the ’90s and in the new century, you know, climate change was always seen as this very distant problem—very dangerous, but very distant—and, critically, one we could prevent if we got our act together. And by 2005, David King and the scientists were saying, “No, sorry, we got that wrong. Climate change came a hundred years sooner than we expected.” And, of course, the big—the most fiendish aspect of that is that once you have triggered climate change, you cannot turn it off quickly. And that’s just because of the laws of physics and chemistry, that, you know, the CO2 stays in the atmosphere forever. And so, he said that even if we stopped all emissions tonight, which, clearly, as you show from the Todd Stern quote, we are hardly doing, but even if we did that, the temperatures will not stop going up for another 30 years.

So, when I walked out of his office that day, I realized that this was going to hit my daughter’s generation very hard. And that was where this book began, just more of a father’s quest to try and figure out how can my daughter live through this? What is it going to mean that the temperatures are going to go up for 50 years? What kind of extreme weather is that going to put into play? And above all, what do we do about it?

And there are solutions. There are things we can do. But I do think that it is a terrible crime that has been committed against my daughter and the rest of Generation Hot, the two billion kids who have been born around the world since we were put on notice about this problem in June of 1988 by Jim Hansen, the NASA scientist, who went to the Senate and said, “Look, this is happening. If we don’t do something about it, we’re threatening the habitability of this planet.” We did not do something about it, for all the reasons that you guys have reported, the disinformation from the oil companies and so forth. And now my daughter and her generation are going to have to live with this. And I think that’s a terrible crime.

JUAN GONZALEZ: All the extreme weather in the past years, there’s a lot of debate as to whether we could reasonably link that to climate change, whether it’s the heat wave in New York City, record heat in 2010, the floods in Pakistan, the weather problems in Europe in 2003. Your sense of that, the individual events versus the general trend?

MARK HERTSGAARD: There’s only debate about that in the United States of America. And we—you know, I get this all the time now, where people say, “Well, you know, there’s all this disagreement.” There is not any disagreement, unless you are watching Fox News and listening to the House Republican Party. Look at the countries in Europe, for example. Conservative parties are running Britain, Germany, France. None of those conservative political parties have questioned the science behind climate change for 15 years. And they all, in terms of their policies, they want to do far more than Barack Obama does. So, we need to understand that the scientific community is clear on this, and has been clear on this for a long time.

But all the things you mentioned, Juan, those extreme weather events, of course you can never 100 percent tie those to global warming, and no scientist would say that you could. But they are certainly part of this pattern. And speaking of that terrible heat wave that you all suffered here in New York last summer, 2010, it was a record, right? Pretty uncomfortable, right? Well, when my daughter is my age, that is going to be a normal summer here. You’re going to have that every other year. And the point is that we have got to figure out ways to prepare for that, as well as turn down the heat. But the challenge now on climate change has been transformed, because of this paradigm shift in the problem, because it’s no longer off in the distance. We’ve got to stop climate change, but we’ve also got to live through it.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Mark Hertsgaard. His book is called Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. So, the tsunami and the earthquake happens in Japan, and the nuclear power plants are, to say the least, highly damaged, in partial meltdown, if not more than that. So, the whole question of nukes come up.

MARK HERTSGAARD: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Nuclear power plants. You wrote an article called “Obama Loves Nukes.” There are many, like George Monbiot, a well-known British columnist, who is saying nukes are the answer, still, despite what’s happening in Japan, despite what’s threatened.

MARK HERTSGAARD: Absolutely, and most scientists say the same thing. David King in Britain says that. Jim Hansen, the NASA scientist who I just I mentioned—I was on a panel with him last night—he supports nukes, as well.

I’ll just tell you a little story. The very first book I wrote was called Nuclear Inc. And the very first time I heard the phrase “global warming” was in 1981 from a nuclear power industry executive, who told me, at a time when all the environmental activists were saying, “Oh, nuclear is dead because of Three Mile Island and no orders.” And I was investigating the industry. And he said, “Oh, no, we’re not dead. You just wait. Wait ’til the turn of the century, and people are going to realize how bad coal is for them and how bad it is for something called global warming.” I said, “What is global warming?” This was 1981. And the nuclear industry was saying then that global warming was going to save their bacon. It is very ironic to me to see George Monbiot and other environmentalists now bringing that prophecy to bear—to fruit.

The reality is, going nuclear will make climate change worse, not better. And that is not because of safety or proliferation. You know, if nuclear worked the way that it’s supposed to in theory, that’s why Jim Hansen is in favor of it. But look at the economics. It costs so much money to build a plant, it takes so long to build that plant, that by the time you’ve got it online, if you invested that same amount of money in energy efficiency, you would get seven times more greenhouse gas emission reductions. So, let’s spend the money where it’s going to give us the biggest bang for the buck, and that is not nuclear. I’m not saying this for any ideological reasons. I’m not opposed to it, in general. But how it works in reality, this is not the answer.

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