Bill McKibben on Fresh Air

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross, who's off this week. If you want to hear some alarming facts about climate change, Bill McKibben has them. He writes in his new book that as the Earth warms, we're now seeing lethal heatwaves in some parts of the world and that the largest physical structures on our planet - the ice caps, coral reefs and rainforests - are disappearing before our eyes.


McKibben's been writing about and advocating for action on climate change since the 1980s, but his new book isn't just a warning of impending disaster. And it isn't just about climate change. McKibben says there are also threats to humanity as we know it from human genetic engineering and from the unbridled development of artificial intelligence. Bill McKibben has written 15 books and is the founder of the environmental organization 350.org. His new book, which offers some dark visions of the future and hope for real change, is called "Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?"


Bill McKibben, welcome back to FRESH AIR. You know, you note that climate change is such a familiar term that - you know, like urban sprawl or, you know, gun violence that it's sort of a part of our journalistic lexicon. And there's been a lot of alarming information about climate change. And when I read your book, I found even more alarming information. And I think it's worth dwelling on it just a little bit. One of the things that struck me was heat waves - not heat waves 50 years from now but heat waves today. What are we finding?


BILL MCKIBBEN: Well, we're already finding heat that taxes the ability of the human body to endure it. The highest reliably recorded temperatures on Earth have happened in the last couple of years. They've been in parts of the Mideast and the Asian subcontinent where city temperatures have reached 129 degrees. When they try to factor in the humidity and dew point, people have been describing - feels like temperatures as high as 165 degrees. I mean, 129 degrees Fahrenheit - that's about where my oven begins, you know? And a human being can survive it maybe for a few hours inside, in the shade. But they can't survive it long term. And the scientists are telling us without any hesitation that, on current trends, by the middle or latter part of the century, vast swaths of the planet will be experiencing those temperatures for weeks on end. And there'll be, in essence, no-go zones for human beings, no-go zones in those continental interiors but also, of course, no-go zones along the coasts where the oceans are rising and where storms are getting more powerful. The game board on which we play the game of human beings is shrinking and shrinking dramatically for the first time since humans wandered out of Africa and started expanding their range.


DAVIES: It's shrinking because coastlines are receding but also because there are places where people can only survive by cowering together in air conditioning.


MCKIBBEN: That's right. And there've become severe limits to how long you can make that work. Already, the World Labor Organization (ph) says that human beings are able to do about 10 percent less work in the course of a day outdoors than they used to be able to. It's simply gotten too hot and too humid. By mid-century, that number will be something like 30 percent less work. Really, the ability to be human is starting to vanish in many, many places.


DAVIES: What's happening with food supplies? And what can we expect?


MCKIBBEN: Well, human beings have had a great run of increasing their supply of food since the end of World War II. But as the Green Revolution begins to play itself out, coming the other direction are these vast heatwaves and shortages of water. And so we're already seeing real effects. I mean, the Arab Spring was triggered in large part by the rise of wheat prices that followed epic drought. The hideous civil war in Syria was triggered in part by epic drought, the deepest drought in the history of what we used to call the Fertile Crescent, that drove a million farmers off their land and into the already destabilized cities of the brutal Assad regime. And we see how those things play out not just in those places but around the world. The refugees that streamed out of Syria were enough to undermine the politics of Western Europe. The refugees now fleeing the highlands of Guatemala and Honduras, where drought has made raising crops an ever iffier proposition, they're, you know, showing up on the southern border and being used as scapegoats by the most vicious elements of our political culture.


DAVIES: So climate change-related drought is what's driving the surge of immigrants?


MCKIBBEN: There's a terrific story on the front page of The Sunday Times talking about precisely how destabilizing the drought and heat has been. If you look at a map of Central America, it's one of the few places in the world where there are big oceans close by on either side. As, you know, the oceans are soaking up most of the excess heat that we're producing. And that makes places like that particularly vulnerable to kind of whipsaw changes in temperature.


DAVIES: And fire. I mean, we've focused a lot on the fires in California because they are nearby. And we see them on television. And they've affected and killed a lot of people. But you write that there are really alarming fires in other parts of the world that we don't pay as much attention to.


MCKIBBEN: There are fires in places where there never used to be. I mean, we're seeing routinely now fires 3, 4, 5 degrees of latitude north of where we ever saw them - across Siberia, across much of the Arctic. It's just gotten too hot and too dry. But we shouldn't skip lightly over those California fires, either. I mean, when you look at a place literally called Paradise that literally turned into hell inside half an hour, you begin to understand how the psychological space that we inhabit is beginning to shrink, too... (continues)