Delegates from across the globe will soon gather at the Paris Climate Change Conference, set to begin at the end of November. Sponsored by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, conference representatives will endeavor—not for the first time—to find ways to "stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system." On this episode of History Talk, three environmental historians, Sam White, John Brooke, and Nicholas Breyfogle, discuss past patterns of climate change—both recent and others from the deep planetary past—and what these historical processes of climate adaptation and survival tell us about humanity's prospects today.

Posted November 2015

A transcript of this podcast is available here.