February 11 – Should Force be Used to Protect Syrian Civilians?; Extreme Weather from Australia to Atlanta, Georgia; The Inside Story of the On-Going Fukushima Disaster

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the humanitarian disaster in Syria brought on by the Assad government’s deliberate policy of starving its own population under siege in Homs, Aleppo and parts of Damascus. Nader Hashemi the Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver and co-author of “The Syria Dilemma” joins us to discuss his article in The New York Times, “Use Force to Save Starving Syrians” and efforts underway to deliver food and allow civilians to escape that has resulted in the detention by the Assad regime of hundreds of men and boys who the UN aid agencies are “deeply concerned” about.

Part 2

Then we examine the catastrophic ice storm hitting the South in the context of increasingly extreme weather events happening across the globe. Peter Ward, a paleontologist who teaches biology and earth and space sciences at the University of Washington joins us. He has studied mass extinctions, almost all of which have been brought about by climate change, and his latest book is “The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps” which we discuss along with the connections between extreme droughts in Australia, floods in England and ice storms in Atlanta, Georgia.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with the author of a new book that reads like a nail-biting thriller but is in fact a definitive account of the Fukushima disaster from the tsunami, to the nuclear catastrophe which continues to this day with areas of the devastated plant no human can go near as every day hundreds of tons of water pour onto cool the melted cores and radioactive water crosses the Pacific from Japan to Malibu, California where the kelp beds are being measured for radiation. One of the nation’s top independent experts on nuclear power, who formerly worked for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, David Lochbaum, the co-author of “Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster”, joins us to discuss his terrifying account of a very real event that could happen here.