May 2, 2001: Climate Change - Dr. Peter D. Ward

We're already in a mass extinction - the lobster in warming waterAsked when the last great catastrophe was, Ward says it was ten minutes ago - we have been losing megafauna and biodiversity continuously for 15,000 years and are now the lobster in slowly heating water, unaware we are about to boil.

Europe could freeze in ten years - 750 million armed and starvingWard warns ice cores show climate can flip in as little as a decade. A Gulf Stream shift would put Europe at Canada's true latitude-temperature, leaving 750 million well-armed people unable to feed themselves and forced to take food elsewhere.

Global warming triggers the next ice ageWard explains the counterintuitive paradox: warming the oceans disrupts the circulation patterns that act as Earth's thermostat, which can plunge Europe into cold and break down the agricultural treaties that hold modern civilization together.

Last specimens of Hawaiian snails kept alive in a refrigeratorWard describes a colleague in Hawaii who keeps the last three or four individuals of dozens of native land snail species alive in a refrigerator - they will not breed in captivity and have no wild populations left, so he presides over their extinctions one by one.

Tunguska every century - and we'd never see it comingWard notes asteroids around 50 meters detonate as airbursts that telescopes cannot detect in advance. A 1908 Tunguska event over Moscow or London would have killed a million instantly, and statistically Earth gets one such event per century.