Download/listen to Radio Ecoshock 130109 here:
 http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock13/ES_130109_Show_LoFi.mp3

Or if you prefer the CD quality version (56 MB) here:
 http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock13/ES_130109_Show.mp3

Opens with a review of record heat and fires in Australia. Are Australians ruining their own country with their huge coal exports? Plus the under-reported monster storm in the Philippines, and Mexican gangs investing in coal.

Then I chat with one of the best environmental journalists, Mark Hertsgaard. Mark just wrapped up key articles for The Nation magazine and recently Newsweek.

While his seven year old daughter waits in the room, Mark has to explain what we will all have to explain to our children: the climate has already been disrupted, and will change still more. Hertsgaard's latest book is "Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth".

Later in this program we're going to tackle a great divide between some climate scientists, and the flood engineers and experts in the United States. I've covered the wild floods in Nashville in May 2010 when the Grand Old Opry went underwater. There were more floods in Wisconsin and Minnesota that fall.

Are these heavily new-laden flood events a sure sign of global warming? Maybe not, says Robert M. Hirsch, research hydrologist and a former Associate Director for Water of the U.S. Geological Survey..

Hirsch isn't a climate denier. He knows the world is warming, and these floods are mostly human caused - but not from greenhouse gases. It's a tricky problem which will work our brains, as we talk with one of the prominent experts in American river systems and flooding.

His work illuminates many of the issues of continuing floods in the UK. How much is climate change, and how much the built environment?