The holiday blizzard of 2010 knocked East Coasters out of their routines this week, but there was a hint of deja vú as the snow fell. Big weather events have been making headlines across the country and around the world for several years, now. Last week, enough snow fell in Minneapolis that the roof of the Metrodome collapsed. Blizzards crippled Western Europe's airports and rain deluged San Diego. Is this bad weather part of a new normal? Is global warming bearing down on us at a hastening pace?

The U.N.’s climate talks in Cancún moved into their second week on Monday. The agenda is dominated by future cuts in carbon emissions and keeping countries honest about their actions to control global warming. Expectations, however, remain low following last year’s talks in Copenhagen, which resulted in no binding agreement to manage the world's carbon emissions.

Are there limits to the kinds of problems humans are capable of solving?

It can certainly seem like it. The conflict in Afghanistan rages on, the schools keep failing, the world is warming up. We throw ideas at these problems, we dream up fixes, we try new cures, yet the problems continue. The conflict rages on. The kids keep dropping out. The hurricanes get stronger. It’s enough to make you throw up your hands and wait for the end times.

A new book about how to solve the looming issues of climate change will hit shelves here in the U.S. in October. It’s called “Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits.” It sounds unsurprising enough, but the author, Bjørn Lomborg, is a controversial figure in the debate on climate change. He’s long been known as a climate change skeptic and has been the subject of vehement criticism for his doubts as to whether global warming is a gravely serious issue.

The Ptarmigan, a mountain bird known in Colorado for its camouflaged exterior, may be at risk due to climate change. Because the birds are limited to alpine habitats, scientists worry for their survival as temperatures rise and snow and ice melt. Last week, environmentalists began a campaign to designate the bird as a threatened species. If the designation is accepted and approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it would require action to combat the threat of climate change, which could lead to legislation to reduce carbon emissions.

All this week, we've been talking with our friends from Scientific American about endings — how cultures fade, and natural resources dwindle. Today, we’re focusing on something even bigger: the end of human life as we know it — in other words, the apocalypse. The question of course, is how will it happen? Nuclear war? a killer virus, or perhaps an environmental disaster?

Is it the end of the world as we know it? This year, we’ve seen terrible flooding, glaciers melting, and deep oil wells breaking. In light of these catastrophic events, we're launching a series this week about whether our modern age is coming to an end along with our friends at Scientific American.

For the first installment of the series, we talk with Michael Moyer, staff editor for Scientific American, about the world's dwindling resources. He recently wrote about this in his article, "How Much is Left?"

The number of people affected by the massive flooding in Pakistan over the past week is larger than the combined total of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Flash floods have hit neighboring Kashmir, killing at least 85 people, and China where more than 1,300 people are feared missing. In Europe, a heat wave has led to the deaths of 5,000 people, and in Russia drought and wildfires are ravaging the country.

Are all these simultaneous natural disasters this summer just a big coincidence, or is it a harbinger of something more serious for Planet Earth? Environmentalist Bill McKibben connects the dots and finds out how much it has to do with global warming.

Move over, Thanksgiving. Easter weekend is shaping up to be a big one for televised sports. The Final Four square off in Indianapolis Saturday, and Major League Baseball opens (in a major way) at Fenway on Sunday. Takeaway sports contributor Ibrahim Abdul Matin joins us to talk about what the weekend holds for the NCAA, and for the Yankees and the Red Sox.

The UN's historic climate change conference in Copenhagen wraps up tomorrow. There are persistent fears that the end could come without a major, binding climate change agreement between the 193 countries. “The next 24 hours are absolutely crucial,” warned UN climate change official Yvo de Boer. (...continue reading)

For hundreds of years, mariners have dreamed of a shipping shortcut through the Arctic that would allow them to speed trade between Asia and the West. Two German ships became the first-ever Western commercial vessels to sail that route, thanks to the recent thawing and withdrawal of the Arctic sea ice due to global warming. BBC Moscow correspondent Richard Galpin tells us what he saw as one of the first journalists onboard this historic journey.

Steven Chu, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, is reaching out to developing nations like China to negotiate on climate change. (He also reaches out to average Americans through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.) Steven Chu joins The Takeaway's guest host Katherine Lanpher to talk about the task of creating real progress in the fight against global warming.

You can connect with Secretary Chu through his Facebook page and see photos of what the Department of Energy is working on through the department's Flickr and Youtube pages.

Click through for a transcript of this interview.

Top climate change officials from China and the U.S. met this week in Beijing to hash out a pre-Copenhagen plan for cutting greenhouse gas. The two countries are the world’s top two greenhouse gas emitters, according to the Brookings Institution. Together, they account for more than 40 percent of annual emissions. Any solution to the greenhouse gas problem may require both countries to transition to low-carbon economies.

Just back from a trip to China is Assistant Energy Secretary David Sandalow, who joins The Takeaway to discuss how talks are going. Click through for the full transcript of the interview.

Some biologists believe that we are now in the midst of what they call “the sixth extinction”—the sixth time in the history of the earth when a devastating mass extinction has occurred. New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert says that some estimate that half of all species may have disappeared by the end of this century. She joins The Takeaway to explain what may be causing this event, and what can be done to stop it.

For more, read an abstract of Elizabeth Kolbert's article, The Sixth Extinction? in The New Yorker. If you are a subscriber to the magazine, you can read the entire article.

Regulating greenhouse gases has been one of the most contentious issues for the EPA. In 2003, the agency ruled that carbon dioxide could not be regulated as a pollutant. A 2007 Supreme Court decision ordered the EPA to review the scientific case for that decision, but the Bush administration ignored that ruling. With the new administration in place, things are expected to change. Lisa Jackson, the new Administrator of the EPA, joins The Takeaway to explain the Agency's plans. Also joining the conversation is Congressman Fred Upton, a Republican Congressman from Michigan, who is the Ranking member of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee. He's one of the leading opponents of cap-and-trade and the Waxman-Markey climate bill working its way through Congress. He joins The Takeaway with his opposition to the bill and why he thinks it would mortgage our future.

The beleaguered Kyoto Protocol, enacted in 1992 to limit global greenhouse gas emissions, but was never ratified by the United States, is back up for negotiations this year. Will the U.S. be a real partner to the cap-and-trade agreement? In advance of the new Kyoto discussions, President Obama is meeting with the representatives of 17 governments at the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate in Washington D.C. The governments will be looking for indications of how others will navigate the Kyoto Protocol negotiations. For more The Takeaway turns to Andrew Revkin, New York Times environmental reporter.

Cap and trade, it’s not a breakfast cereal or an off-season NFL strategy. Yes even though the NFL draft starts tomorrow, but no, it is not some new football strategy or rule. So what exactly is cap and trade, and why are some Republicans predicting that it’s going to cost each household in the United States over $3,000 if this Democrat-sponsored global warming proposal gets approved?

To answer these questions, The Takeaway is joined by John Reilly, an MIT Environmental Economist. He is the man behind the curtain who actually calculated the cost of the proposed cap and trade. And he says that the GOP has misrepresented his data.

What have you heard about clean coal? That it involves vats of liquid carbon dioxide annexed away underground? That it's dangerous? That it's never been done before? In an exclusive interview, Scientific American's energy and environmental editor David Biello sits down with The Takeaway to chat about the technology formally known as "carbon capture and sequestration" ("CCS"), carbon balloons, and carbon geysers— the newest Old Faithfuls.

Check out more of what Biello has to say on Scientific American, where he did a week's worth of carbon capture and sequestration coverage.

And for more coverage of what a "new energy economy" will look like, check out The Takeaway's Power Trip clean energy series.

For nearly 100 years, birds couldn't shake their human paparazzi.

As part of the U.S. government's Bird Migration Program, bird enthusiasts from Kansas to the West Indies tracked down our feathered friends — the Jennifer Anistons of yesteryear — scribbling down notes about their habits: When they came to the area in springtime, where they roosted (and with whom they roosted), and when they flew away for winter.

The note-taking program was first started in 1882 under the leadership of bird expert Wells W. Cook, and it ended in 1970. I spoke with the program's last director, Chandler Robbins, who, at 90, is just three years into his retirement from the United States Geological Survey. Robbins has been protecting the notecards from the incinerator for more than 30 years. He gave us a history of the bird program and told us why it's so important for the two-by-fives to be dusted off and used — before the paper that holds them crumbles away. Click on the LISTEN button below to hear the conversation!

Starting in 1882 and continuing for almost a century, the United State's Bird Migration Program collected two-by-five notecards from bird watchers around North America. Today, these long preserved cards — did we mention that there were over six million of them? — are being dusted off, in the hopes that they can tell us something about a bird of a different feather: climate change. Jessica Zelt, coordinator of the newly established North American Bird Phenology Program where she is in charge of digitizing the cards, joins the show to tell us more.

Are you itchin' to get your hands on a little American history? You can transcribe the migration notecards into the digital directory from your very own home. Click here to help! Go on, be a part of bird history.

For more, read Molly Webster's Producer's Note

And before we let you go, we'd like to leave you with a little bird quote from our friends here at the Internet, because really, what's the World Wide Web good for if not to root-out some profound, bird-related witticisms? Ahem: "My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather." ~Loire Hartwould

(c) USGS.gov

(c) USGS.gov