1. Drawdown The Most Comprehensive Plan by Paul Hawken
   
2. What If We Get It Right?  By Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
3.  All We Can Save edited by  Katharine K. Wilkinson and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and
4. Climate Wayfinding by Kathrien K. Wilkenson

1. 23:17-27:53 (4:46)
2. 12:26-13:44 (1:14

   Last minute Guest: Johanna Miller of the Natural Resources Council, The power of working together, and a legislative update. Call your senator and ask for support of H740 which build the information for the state to know what needs to be done on the climate front.

US judge halts Trump admin’s blockade on new wind and solar projects 

It reads in part: Every once in a while I have to snap out of the hypnotic grip of the bizarre news cycle and remind myself—and you—that there’s something even more important underway than the obvious mental and moral decline of the president: the relentless rise in the temperature of the planet. So here’s my latest occasional update from the physical world, and I fear the news is not good.

Let’s begin with the immediate past, and stay close to home, because the U.S. has been the center of some of the most extreme meteorological action on planet earth recently. Consider our winter: though it was chilly in the Northeast, if you averaged the temperature across the lower 48 it was the second-hottest winter on record. Thats because nine states had their hottest winter ever and five their second-hottest. As Andrea Thompson pointed out in Scientific American, “nowhere in the U.S. had a record cold winter this year. Nowhere even came close.”

That winter, by the way, was December, January, and February—what we call “meteorological winter” because it coincides with the coldest quarter of the year. It was outrageously hot and very dry, with severely shrunken snowpacks across the mountains of the West, which made Westerners nervous about the chances for wildfire as the summer wore on.

And then came March.

March was the single craziest month in U.S. weather history. Here’s how Seth Borenstein put it in the lede of his account for the Associated Press

March’s persistent unseasonable heat was so intense that the continental United States registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to federal weather data.

The federal government is still collecting weather data (though far less than it used to) and so we know the following remarkable fact according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,

The average maximum temperature for March was especially high at 11.4 F (6.3 C) above the 20th century average and was almost a degree warmer than the average daytime high for April.

As Bob Henson points out in the Yale-based blog Eye of the Storm,

In 35 of the 48 contiguous states, the statewide average reading was among the top-ten warmest for any March. Not a single contiguous state was cooler than average.

Henson also points out that a lack of rainfall meant it’s so far been the driest year in American history

The nationally averaged precipitation total for 2026 to date is an ominous one: a mere 4.79 inches. That’s the lowest value on record for any January-to-March interval, including such notoriously dry periods as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The previous record low was 5.27 inches, set in Jan.-Mar. 1910.

As Henson’s colleague Jeff Masters succinctly told the AP:

Climate change is kicking our butts

And I fear it’s barely begun the beating. Because over the last two weeks, even as the world has fixed its gaze on the Middle East, meteorologists have been staring in some awe and terror at what appears to be a rapidly building El Niño. I’ve been telling you this is on the way for some months, but it’s coming into ever-clearer focus. NOAA again, in its April forecast, put the odds of a El Niño beginning this summer at better than sixty percent. More to the point, the wide array of computer models around the planet are beginning to predict a so-called “super El Niño,” when temperatures in the critical region of the Pacific shoot up far far far higher than in the past. Henson and Masters again:

For October, roughly half of the ECMWF ensemble is calling for sea surface temperatures in the main El Niño region (Niño3.4) to exceed 2.5 degrees Celsius above the seasonal average. Such values would correspond to what’s loosely referred to as a “super El Niño.” Though there’s no official definition for a “super” event, the term is often attached to El Niño when its peak anomalies reach at least +2.0°C. Since 1950, the only El Niño events that have hit this threshold for at least one three-month interval were in 1972–73, 1982–83, 1997–98, 2015–16, and 2023–24. Only one of those events, in 2015–16, pushed all the way past +2.5°C.

Here’s a useful graph of the various estimates from the computer modelling, courtesy of Zeke Hausfather

Basically it reads: a world we haven’t seen before. Because remember, El Niño comes on top of the steadily rising temperature of the earth. If these forecasts bear out, then possibly 2026 and certainly 2027 will be the hottest years ever recorded on this earth. As the atmospheric scientist Paul Roundy put it, there’s a “real potential for the strongest El Niño event in 140 years.” We don’t know, of course, exactly how this will manifest, but as Gabrielle Cannon wrote yesterday in the Guardian

A super El Niño that occurred in 2015 brought severe drought in Ethiopia, water supply shortages in Puerto Rico, and smashed records after unleashing a vicious hurricane season in the central North Pacific, according to an analysis by US federal scientists.

The cycle tends to create drought and heat across Australia, around southern and central Africa, in India and in parts of South America, including in the Amazon rainforest. Heavy precipitation, meanwhile, could hit the southern tier of the US, parts of the Middle East, and south-central Asia.

I think it’s safe to say that we can expect more weather chaos than we’ve ever seen before (the good folks at Covering Climate Now put together a useful briefing for reporters last week). Here’s my prediction, since my job is to figure out how the physical and political worlds intersect:

The havoc unleashed by a super El Niño will coincide with the havoc unleashed by Trump in the Gulf to produce a perfect storm of support for rapid action on getting off fossil fuels. Our brief vacation from thinking about climate change as a crucial fact of life on this planet will be over; the conjoined fears of the next months will combine to put us in a very new place politically.

My main fear is that this useful moment is coming very late in the game.