Andrew Geller speaks with Dr. Ted Schuur, an Associate Professor in the University of Florida's Biology Department and Principal Investigator of the Permafrost Carbon Network, discuss permafrost and what's happening to it in a rapidly warming Arctic.

Then Joe Romm, Editor of the Climate Progress blog, joins Andrew to talk about the 2012 climate, recent global talks and what happened, as well as what it might take for enough people to demand the drastic actions necessary to possibly prevent catastrophic climate change.

Ticking Arctic Carbon Bomb May Be Bigger Than Thought

Loss of Ice, Melting Of Permafrost And Other Climate Effects Are Occurring At An Alarming Pace

Thawing of permafrost to be ‘major factor’ in global warming, warns UN report

UNEP Permafrost Report (Dec 2012) PDF

Study: Carbon release to atmosphere 10 times faster now than 56 million years ago, the PETM, a time of 10°F warming and mass extinction

Study: We’re Headed To 11°F Warming And Even 7°F Requires ‘Nearly Quadrupling The Current Rate Of Decarbonisation’

An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts

Pricewaterhouse Cooper Low Carbon Economy Index 2012

Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011

Host Jay Thiemeyer speaks with David McNally about his book Global Slump, which analyzes the global financial meltdown as the first systemic crisis of the neoliberal stage of capitalism. McNally argues that – far from having ended – the crisis has ushered in a whole period of worldwide economic and political turbulence. In developing an account of the crisis as rooted in fundamental features of capitalism, Global Slump challenges the view that its source lies in financial deregulation.

McNally locates the recent meltdown in the intense economic restructuring that marked the recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Through this lens, he highlights the emergence of new patterns of world inequality and new centers of accumulation, particularly in East Asia, and the profound economic instabilities these produced.  In Global Slump McNally offers an original account of the “financialization” of the world economy during this period, and explores the intricate connections between international financial markets and new forms of debt and dispossession, particularly in the Global South.

David McNally is professor of political science at York University, Toronto. He is the author of five previous books: Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism (1988); Against the Market: Political Economy Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique (2003); Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor and Liberation (2001); Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism (2002; second revised edition 2006); and Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism (2011). His articles have appeared in many journals, including Historical Materialism, Capital and Class, New Politics, and Review of Radical Political Economics. David McNally is also a long-time activist in socialist, anti-poverty and migrant justice movements.

Host Michelle Schroeder Fletcher speaks with professor and author George Lakeoff about his new book, co-authored with Elisabeth Wehling, called THE LITTLE BLUE BOOK: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic. Lakeoff says the Democrats have too often failed to use language linking their moral values with their policies. He offers Democrats and progressives language to communicate their moral values clearly and forcefully, with hands-on advice for discussing the most pressing issues of our time. He also deconstructs the ways that extreme conservative positions have permeated political discourse.

George Lakeoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Don’t Think of an Elephant!, among other works, and is America’s leading expert on the framing of political ideas. Elisabeth Wehling is a political strategist and author working in the U.S. and Europe. She is doing research in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, on how politics is understood both in American and Europe.

Host Marianne Barisonek speaks with Dennis Marker, author of FIFTEEN STEPS TO CORPORATE FEUDALISM: How the Rich Convinced America’s Middle Class to Eliminate Themselves From Ronald Reagan to the Tea Party Movement.

Never has a philosophy of a country shifted as radically as it has the last thirty years. Marker details in pull-no-punches prose how the assault on the middle classes is widespread and relentless. Determining our actions today can move us towards either a stronger, more positive future, or a future shrouded in fear, poverty, war.

In a full frontal attack by what Marker calls the Corporate Feudalists, Marker details how the middle class has become superfluous to the very rich and why various policies were deliberately created to eliminate them. Their defining characteristic is dirty, scorched-earth partisanship carried out regardless of cost. Conservatives are anxious again to finish first – with the big prize- monopoly control of the American government, and the power to turn their ideology into the law of the land.