A hurricane in California. A never-ending heatwave. Raging forest fires (and subsequent poor air quality). It’s safe to say that no matter where you live in the United States, summer 2023 has been the season of climate change. 

Overwhelmed by all the disastrous forecasts? You’re not alone. To help break down this multifaceted issue that intersects with politics and enormously complex science, Katie recently sought help from an excerpt. She spoke to Daniel Swain, Ph.D., a climate scientist with UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Since he studies extreme weather events and how they change in our warming climate, he answered all her burning questions about why this summer has unfolded so disastrously and what it would take to change this trend.

Check out our favorite moments from the interview here, but don’t forget to watch the full video interview for all the details on what our future may hold.

Katie Couric: A New York Times op-ed writer got it perfectly right when he described the last few months as “the summer from climate hell all across Earth” — it has ceased being possible to escape or deny what we have done to our planet and ourselves. When you saw the events of this summer unfolding — storms, fires, flooding, and severe weather in general — what were your thoughts?

Daniel Swain: That op-ed summarizes the sentiments that I’ve been feeling. I think a lot of my colleagues in climate science have been feeling, in some cases, shock. But not surprise. Because unfortunately, this is not a fluke. This is part of a long-term trend in this direction. The reality is what we’ll see on a warming planet is more and more of what we’ve been seeing this summer.

Are we at the point of no return?

A lot of people have that exact question. Have we hit an inflection point? Is the warming accelerating? Is there a point of no return? I do have some better news on that front at least, which is that the problem is the accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere caused by human activities. This isn’t some exogenous problem. This isn’t some magic alien space laser that’s teeing up the planet. It’s us. Which means that we can fix the problem. The good news is this is not something that’s completely out of our control. The challenge is we’re not necessarily making changes with the level of urgency and seriousness that we would need to be doing to solve the underlying problem of global warming and all of the changes in climate that’s bringing about. But it’s still a solvable problem. If we can, as rapidly as possible, bring most of our global carbon emissions close to zero, we will, to the best of our scientific understanding, stop the warming.

We’ll never be able to reverse climate change though, will we?

Well, reversing it is harder than slowing and then halting it. However in the long run, over thousands of years, if we do bring our emissions back into equilibrium with what the earth can handle, the earth will essentially start to cool again. That’s not going to happen in our lifetime. But it’s something induced by the way that civilization has developed over the past couple hundred years, it would then go away if we stopped doing that.

How much of this is the earth’s natural warming and cooling cycle and how much of it is created by human beings?

That’s a good point to bring up because the Earth does experience natural periods of warming and also natural periods of cooling for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s variations in the amount of energy that’s coming out of the sun and reaching Earth. Sometimes it’s because the earth itself over many thousands of years has tilted on its axis slightly differently, which affects the seasons. So parts of the earth are getting more of the sun’s radiation. Sometimes, it’s from the biological or chemical world where maybe there are volcanic eruptions that block out the sun or belt out a bunch of heat, trapping greenhouse gasses. Naturally, all of those things can — and have — happened many times in the earth’s history over thousands and even millions of years. But the rate at which the earth is warming now is unprecedented.