Climate Emergency Forum Podcast

Wildfires are entering a dangerous new phase. In this episode Madrid-based guest Alfonso Soria joins our regular panel to examine the intensifying wildfire crises affecting Europe, North America, and the boreal North. The panel explores how extreme heat, prolonged drought, dry vegetation, erratic winds, and changing jet-stream patterns are creating larger, faster, and more destructive fires.

Learn about what it's like at the bottom of the world with Antarctic facilities engineer and climate restoration advocate Ray Sundby, who spent four winters at McMurdo Station and the Amundsen‑Scott South Pole Station. In this episode, Ray shares first‑hand stories of life in the cold and dark Antarctic winter, from maintaining critical infrastructure and water supplies to navigating isolation in small, tightly knit communities of fewer than 200 people.

In this episode we introduce the Climate Intervention Environmental Impact Fund (CIEIF), a unique family-funded initiative that supports climate intervention field tests by financing rigorous environmental impact assessment and stakeholder outreach. Fund manager and environmental attorney Peter Jenkins and science advisor Dr. Renaud de Richter explain how the fund focuses on projects with real-world field trials that can scale to meaningful climate benefits, rather than basic research or conventional adaptation and clean energy efforts.

Herb Simmens of the Climate Emergency Forum speaks with climate scientist Dr. Ken Caldeira at the first Climate Systems Engineering Conference at the University of Chicago. Caldeira reflects on his pioneering role in solar geoengineering and recounts the unlikely bureaucratic origins of the now‑dominant term “solar radiation management.”

In this episode we examine North America’s extraordinary early‑summer heat, floods, fires, and cascading impacts. From Ottawa’s record rainfall and basement‑flooding storm to northern Canada’s boreal forest ablaze, they connect local disasters to global climate dynamics and jet stream disruptions.

In this episode we examine how repeated spring and early‑summer heatwaves across Europe are undermining crops, livestock, rivers, and food prices. We connect extreme heat, drought, and locked jet‑stream patterns to falling yields, stressed farmers, and rising risks of regional and global food emergencies.

Europe is in the grip of a record‑shattering heatwave, with France, Spain, the UK and much of the continent seeing all‑time and June temperature records fall in rapid succession. From Madrid to New York, our panel unpacks what this extreme heat really means beyond the headlines: deadly heat stress, school closures, wildfire risks, collapsing harvests, and the mounting toll on both humans and non‑human animals. This isn’t just “a hot summer” – it’s a clear signal of how a rapidly warming climate is reshaping daily life across Europe and the world.

This special episode of Climate Emergency Forum welcomes back co‑founder and longtime host Regina after a long absence as she completes her master’s degree in sustainability at Columbia University in New York. Herb Simmens introduces Regina and reflects on how often viewers have asked “Where is Regina?” as she stepped away from the Forum to take on an intensive period of study and work at the Center for Sustainable Development. Now, she returns to share what she has learned and how it will strengthen her climate advocacy going forward.

In this episode we unpack the latest “10 New Insights in Climate Science” report and what it really means for our future. From record‑shattering global and ocean heat to marine heatwaves, weakening land and ocean carbon sinks, and the tight feedback loop between climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, the panel connects the dots across Earth’s rapidly shifting systems.

Retiring RCP 8.5 is being used by denialist and right‑wing media to claim we’ve dodged the worst climate futures and that past climate warnings were overblown. In this episode, Herb Simmens talks with Dr. Peter Carter and Paul Beckwith about why that narrative is dangerously misleading and what today’s record temperatures and ongoing fossil fuel dependence really tell us.