The Climate Chronicles

The Climate Chronicles

By Dagomar DegrootScienceHistoryEarth Sciences
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The Climate Chronicles episodes

  • Episode 6: Growing up in the Glacials

    Created, narrated, and produced by Professor Dagomar Degroot of Georgetown University, The Climate Chronicles reveals how climate change has shaped humanity’s past, and explores what history can tell us about the future of global warming. With clear, dramatic storytelling, each episode brings history to life through vivid storytelling and cutting-edge science.


    In the fifth and final episode of our first season, Becoming Human, Professor Degroot tells the epic story of how climate change spurred the evolution of the last hominin species - including our own. He explains how ancient DNA is uncovering previously hidden chapters in this remarkable tale. He shows how industrialization and famine originally brought it to light. And he closes the season by considering the implications of the deep histories we've explored in the past five episodes. 

    The Climate Chronicles is really an audio book. The complete first season gives a unique overview not only of how climate change may have created our species, but also of the history of science that revealed our origins, and the creative detective work that climatologists, archaeologists, and geneticists use to dive into the deep past.

     

    For an episode trailer and a transcript complete with maps, graphs, and other images, visit TheClimateChronicles.com.

    42 min
  • Episode 5: Miracles of Resilience

    Created, narrated, and produced by Professor Dagomar Degroot of Georgetown University, The Climate Chronicles reveals how climate change has shaped humanity’s past, and explores what history can tell us about the future of global warming. With clear, dramatic storytelling, each episode brings history to life through vivid storytelling and cutting-edge science.

     

    In the fourth episode of our first season, Becoming Human, Professor Degroot explores how our hominin ancestors learned to cope with, and even exploit, the wildly fluctuating climate of the Pleistocene. He uses the extraordinary migration of a hominin species named Homo erectus to introduce the concept of resilience: a key but contested term that can help us understand our fate on a warming world. 

     

    The Climate Chronicles is really an audio book. The first season gives a unique overview not only of how climate change may have created our species, but also of the history of science that revealed our origins, and the creative detective work that climatologists, archaeologists, and geneticists use to dive into the deep past.

     

    For an episode trailer and a transcript complete with maps, graphs, and other images, visit TheClimateChronicles.com.

    31 min
  • Episode 4: The Precarious Pleistocene

    Created, narrated, and produced by Professor Dagomar Degroot of Georgetown University, The Climate Chronicles reveals how climate change has shaped humanity’s past, and explores what history can tell us about the future of global warming. With clear, dramatic storytelling, each episode brings history to life through vivid storytelling and cutting-edge science.

     

    In the third episode of our first season, Becoming Human, Professor Degroot touches on everything from Noah's Flood to nuclear submarines in telling the strange, three-century-long history of the discovery of the Ice Age. Then, he explains why rapid climate changes of remarkable intensity threatened our ancestors in the world of the late Pleistocene Epoch.

     

    The Climate Chronicles is really an audio book. The first season gives a unique overview not only of how climate change may have created our species, but also of the history of science that revealed our origins, and the creative detective work that climatologists, archaeologists, and geneticists use to dive into the deep past.

     

    For an episode trailer and a transcript complete with maps, graphs, and other images, visit TheClimateChronicles.com.

    34 min
  • Episode 3: The Great Cooling

    Created and narrated by Professor Dagomar Degroot of Georgetown University, The Climate Chronicles reveals how climate change has shaped humanity’s past—and what history can tell us about the future of global warming. With clear, dramatic storytelling, each episode brings history to life through gripping narratives and cutting-edge science.

     

    In our third episode, the second of our first season, Becoming Human, Professor Degroot takes listeners through the dramatic cooling of our planet that began some 45 million years ago. He explains how climate change influenced evolution - including the evolution of our distant ancestors in a drying Africa. 


    The Climate Chronicles is really an audio book. The first season gives a unique overview not only of how climate change may have created our species, but also of the history of science that revealed our origins, and the creative detective work that climatologists, archaeologists, and geneticists use to dive into the deep past.


    For an episode trailer and a transcript complete with maps, graphs, and other images, visit TheClimateChronicles.com.

    31 min
  • Episode 2: Antecedents of the Anthropocene

    Created, narrated, and produced by Professor Dagomar Degroot of Georgetown University, The Climate Chronicles reveals how climate change has shaped humanity’s past, and explores what history can tell us about the future of global warming. With clear, dramatic storytelling, each episode brings history to life through vivid storytelling and cutting-edge science.

     

    In our second episode, the first of our first season, Becoming Human, Professor Degroot introduces the far-fetched possibility that humanity might not be the first intelligent species to overheat the Earth. By investigating this idea, Degroot explains how scientists piece together the deep history of climate change on Earth.

     

    The Climate Chronicles is really an audio book. The first season gives a unique overview not only of how climate change may have created our species, but also of the history of science that revealed our origins, and the creative detective work that climatologists, archaeologists, and geneticists use to dive into the deep past.

     

    For an episode trailer and a transcript complete with maps, graphs, and other images, visit TheClimateChronicles.com.

    34 min
  • Episode 1, Introduction: A Shore on Svalbard

    Created, narrated, and produced by Professor Dagomar Degroot of Georgetown University, The Climate Chronicles reveals how climate change has shaped humanity’s past, and explores what history can tell us about the future of global warming. With clear, dramatic storytelling, each episode brings history to life through vivid storytelling and cutting-edge science.


    In our introductory episode, Professor Degroot uses one of the great adventure stories of the seventeenth century - the tale of fourteen desperate men deserted on two tiny Arctic islands - to explain why the history of climate change matters so much today. Along the way, he shows what climate change actually is, describes how we can trace it into the deep past, and reveals why it's so hard to identify its influence on human history. The effort to recover climate's past is all about creative detective work - the kind that can uncover how a small group of men survived, and died, centuries ago, in some of the extreme environments on Earth. 

     

    For an episode trailer and a transcript complete with maps, graphs, and other images, visit TheClimateChronicles.com.

    36 min

About The Climate Chronicles

From the publisher's feed

Today’s global warming has no precedent in Earth’s history. Yet long before we started overheating the planet, natural climate changes shaped our past. In the Climate Chronicles, Dagomar Degroot, one of the world’s leading historians of climate change, explains how climate change influenced humanity’s history, from the evolution of our species to the onset of today’s climate crisis.