This podcast explores how climate change transformed from a minor scientific concern in 1980 into the world's most urgent global emergency by 2025. It highlights a prosperity paradox, illustrating how significant human triumphs like poverty reduction, urbanization, and globalization unintentionally accelerated environmental decline. While billions of people gained better lives, the resulting ecological overshoot pushed the planet’s vital signs into a dangerous state of instability. The text argues that the current crisis stems from a fundamental mismatch between accelerating industrial systems and the Earth's natural cycles. Ultimately, the source serves as a historical reflection on forty years of societal choices and the necessity of redefining human progress.