Global Warming is Real

About Global Warming is Real

A podcast helping people like you who feel anxious about climate change challenge the narratives that fuel overwhelm and reconnect you with the natural world to help you stay grounded in what you’re protecting rather than consumed by what’s being lost. Earthbound is about what it means to be human on a warming planet. Host Thomas Schueneman, a climate writer, global freelance journalist, and audio producer, talks with scientists, philosophers, activists, artists, Indigenous leaders, policy experts, and everyday people about how a changing Earth is reshaping our lives—and how our choices, values, and imaginations are reshaping the planet in return. From climate politics and planetary health to environmental justice, mental well‑being, psychology, and philosophy, the show explores the quiet work of repairing our relationship with nature and each other. Earthbound offers clear‑eyed, human‑centered stories from the Anthropocene.

Publisher

Thomas Schueneman

Category

science · society & culture · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

1 Mar 2025

Latest episode

10 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

38 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   10 Oct 2026

   Mutually Assured Distraction: Why Worry About Climate Change When AI Will Get Us First?

   In the 1960s, schoolchildren practiced for the end of the world by hiding under their desks. Sixty years later, the desks are virtual, and the apocalypse has company. In this solo episode, host Thomas Schueneman reads a short essay from Thinking Out Loud, his column in the Global Warming Is Real newsletter. After nearly twenty years of warning about climate change, he watches artificial intelligence arrive to steal climate’s existential thunder. Then he takes the joke seriously enough to follow it somewhere useful, to the question beneath both crises: is our wisdom keeping pace with the complexity we keep building? In this episode Duck and cover, mutually assured destruction, and a magazine that asked: "What, me worry?" The virtual desks we hide under today, or mutually assured distraction AGI and AGW: two acronyms, two threats of our own making The irony of AI as both a burden on the climate and a hoped-for fix Finding the humor in hilarious times, and why it helps Why complexity does not imply resilience or wisdom The question that matters more than any forecast: what kind of world do we want? Hope, Tom suggests, begins when we stop fooling ourselves, and that cuts both ways. The danger is real. So is our capacity to answer it. The way out isn't a better hiding place. It's climbing out from under the desk, long enough to imagine something better. Links Read the original essay and subscribe to the Global Warming Is Real newsletter: globalwarmingisreal.com https://globalwarmingisreal.com/2026/10/01/why-worry-climate-change-and-ai/ (https://globalwarmingisreal.com/2026/10/01/why-worry-climate-change-and-ai/) Earthbound: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com (https://www.earthboundpodcast.com) Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1801556711 (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1801556711) Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1oTiYPa10UY9pqWgSwwEnF (https://open.spotify.com/show/1oTiYPa10UY9pqWgSwwEnF) Earthbound on Substack: https://planetwatch.substack.com (https://planetwatch.substack.com) Further reading: Energy and AI, International Energy Agency, 2025: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai (https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai) Related: Breaking the Chains: The Lust for Power vs. the Light of Energy: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/breaking-the-chains-the-lust-for-power-vs-the-light-of-energy/ (https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/breaking-the-chains-the-lust-for-power-vs-the-light-of-energy/) Related solo essay: Climate and Peace | Lessons of Minneapolis: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/climate-and-peace-lessons-of-minneapolis/ (https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/climate-and-peace-lessons-of-minneapolis/) Related solo essay: The Fourth Turning Meets the Ways of the Duck: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/the-fourth-turning-meets-the-ways-of-the-duck-responding-with-calm-in-a-chaotic-world/ (https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/the-fourth-turning-meets-the-ways-of-the-duck-responding-with-calm-in-a-chaotic-world/) Support the show: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/support/ (https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/support/)

2. 

   28 Sept 2026

   The Human Idea: Earth's Newest Ecosystem - A Conversation with Anne Riley

   What if human thought isn’t separate from nature, but Earth’s newest ecosystem? Anne Riley spent more than 30 years in accounting, high tech, and banking before walking away from a system built on one goal: maximize profit at all costs. Her book, The Human Idea: Earth’s Newest Ecosystem, starts inside a single cell and builds outward to us. Life runs in nested layers, DNA to cell to body to colony, all bound by one rule. Do what you need, but don’t harm your neighbor. Humans run the same design one layer up, built from ideas. The difference is choice. Our rules are whatever we decide, and a bad idea spreads as easily as a good one. In this conversation Why Riley left accounting, and the goal that crowds out every other goal The ideasphere: idea, mind, body, institution, society “Amazing and dangerous”: how the takers outspread the live-and-let-livers Government as the body’s nervous system, and what money does to it Nature’s one hundred percent tax system Schools that compete for students, and healthcare split into wellness and catastrophe Measuring pollution the way a body reports a cut finger AI as a possible form of life without life’s constraints Why a quiet person with a big idea keeps talking anyway Riley calls herself a super introvert and the wrong person to spread her own theory. Some people tell her it will never work. Others ask when we start. Links The Human Idea: Earth’s Newest Ecosystem by Anne Riley, 2nd ed., Ideasphere World Publishing, 2024: thehumanidea.com (https://www.thehumanidea.com/) Anne Riley’s books, including DINA and Aerie: thehumanidea.com/books (https://www.thehumanidea.com/books) Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem, Michael Rothschild, 1990: https://books.google.com/books/about/Bionomics.html (https://books.google.com/books/about/Bionomics.html?id=nEszGwAACAAJ) Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari, 2024, on AI as “alien intelligence”: https://www.ynharari.com/book/nexus/ (https://www.ynharari.com/book/nexus/) Earthbound: Bill McKibben, Here Comes the Sun: earthboundpodcast.com/bill-mckibben-here-comes-the-sun-and-how-renewables-can-power-the-future (https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/bill-mckibben-here-comes-the-sun-and-how-renewables-can-power-the-future/) Earthbound: Diana Colleen, They Could Be Saviors | Curing Billionaire-ism: earthboundpodcast.com/they-could-be-saviors (https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/they-could-be-saviors/) Earthbound: earthboundpodcast.com (https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/) Earthbound Listener Survey: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/survey/2026/ (https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/survey/2026/) Global Warming Is Real: globalwarmingisreal.com (https://globalwarmingisreal.com/)

3. 

   11 Sept 2026

   Maya Lilly: Lifting the Veil - Storytelling as a Catalyst for Change

   Maya Lilly builds documentaries around one question: what makes a story move somebody to act? She trained at Juilliard, ran an environmental club there called the Juilliard Greens, then took an environmental studies degree and moved to Hollywood on purpose. The plan was to learn what the industry does well and either get climate storytelling inside it or carry the techniques back to organizers. She did both. She is now a lead producer for The Years Project. Her definition of a story is narrow and very old. Somebody has a problem, confronts it, and overcomes it. What the arc does, she says, is lift the veil on a run of events that would otherwise feel unconnected. That reorders the work. Instead of finishing a film and attaching an impact campaign to the end, she goes to communities that already have a campaign and builds the film in service of it. In East Palestine, Ohio, her first question to residents was what do you need. In Cancer Alley, she points to Sharon Lavigne, who confronted the petrochemical industry with one simple sentence. She argues the other side has won by hammering simple narratives, while her own side has often explained complex issues poorly. Her team’s working question is how to keep the film from going wonky, how, in doing so, they might swap “anthropocentric” or “greenhouse gas emissions” for something much simpler: pollution. She pushes funders too. One told her proudly that its overhead is only ten percent. Some of that, she said, needs to be for better communications. We also get into Ishmael, deep ecology, and the consequences of an economy built with little consideration for the ecology that underpins it. And we end in the water, with a twenty-minute swim to a platform in Jamaica and hundreds of jellyfish that let her pass. She looked them up later. There were so many because the ocean is warming. “Storytelling for me is like looking through a little peephole into a wider room. So often what I’m trying to do is find the smaller story that shows the bigger story within it.” · Maya Lilly Resources Maya Lilly and The Years Project (https://theyearsproject.com/) Hop Hopkins, “Racism Is Killing the Planet” Sierra, 8 June 2020 (https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/racism-killing-planet): Sharon Lavigne, 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize, North America (https://www.goldmanprize.org/recipient/sharon-lavigne/): RISE St. James (https://risestjames.org/), founded by Sharon Lavigne in 2018 Beyond Plastics (https://www.beyondplastics.org/) Rare (https://rare.org/), and its Center for Behavior and the Environment Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (https://www.ishmael.org/) Earthbound Podcast (https://earthboundpodcast.com) Global Warming Is Real (https://globalwarmingisreal.com) Full raw interview audio (https://ko-fi.com/post/Maya-Lilly-Full-Interview-Audio-for-Lifting-the-F6S726RULH)

Who has been a guest on Global Warming is Real

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Katherine Lacefield
• Joshua Harrison
• Lee Stewart
• Jennifer Heller
• Kyle Ritland

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

86,004

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.6 / 5

5 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 62 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

95

Social presence

0

YouTube

72

Engagement

0

Contact Global Warming is Real

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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