The Boring Climate Podcast

Research, Industry, Enterprise: An Honest Conversation on India’s CCUS Moment with Dr Ashish Lele & Dr Anjan Ray

#BoringDeeper We recently took #theboringclimatepodcast offline, to hold Boring Deeper, our first-ever dedicated conference on carbon capture, utilisation and storage (#ccus) In this session, Dr Ashish Lele (chair of India's high-level taskforce that developed the CCUS roadmap) and Dr Anjan Ray (one of our country's foremost experts on our net-zero transition), speak to GPS Renewables CEO Mainak Chakraborty on what it would take to make India’s ambitious CCUS roadmap a reality.

When Mangoes Bloom Early: Geetha Ramaswami & Suhirtha Muhil on What India's Trees Are Telling Us

India's trees are flowering earlier than they used to. Geetha Ramaswami and Suhirtha Muhil M have spent 15 years documenting exactly this through SeasonWatch, a citizen science initiative they helped build that has now logged nearly 900,000 observations of tree behavior across India.Geetha is an ecologist and one of the principal researchers behind SeasonWatch. Suhirtha led the development of SeasonWatch's Climate Change Educator Handbook — designed to be age-appropriate, culturally grounded, and taught through the tree outside the classroom window.We ask them what phenology is and why it matters, what 900,000 data points reveal about India's shifting seasons, what happens when a mango tree flowers three weeks early but its pollinators don't follow, and how citizen science turns everyday observation into a data revolution.

The Sundarbans Is Losing Ground: Dr Annu Jalais on Climate Change, Displacement and Survival

The Sundarbans is one of the most biodiverse — and most climate-vulnerable — places on Earth. A vast mangrove delta straddling India and Bangladesh, it is home to 4.5 million people, the Bengal tiger, and an ecosystem that has absorbed centuries of storms, floods, and now, a rapidly rising sea. In the past decade alone, the region has been struck by five major cyclones. It has lost over 210 square kilometres of land to the Bay of Bengal since 1964. And long before islands sink, salinity is quietly poisoning the soil — forcing migration, dismantling livelihoods, and unravelling communities. To understand what is really happening here — and what it means for the future — we speak with Dr. Annu Jalais, environmental anthropologist and Associate Professor at Krea University.  Annu has spent decades living with and studying the communities of the Sundarbans. Her work sits at the intersection of climate change, conservation, and human–nonhuman relations, and has fundamentally challenged how we think about people, tigers, and coexistence in a landscape under siege.

Power from Above: Author Bill McKibben on the Solar Revolution

Bill McKibben wrote the book on climate change — literally. In 1989, The End of Nature told the world what was coming. Thirty-six years later, his latest book Here Comes the Sun makes the case that the energy transition is already here — and moving faster than most people realise. In this episode, we talk to one of the most influential environmentalists in history about the solar revolution that's reshaping global power. We cover why the Global South is leading the renewables charge, what energy democracy looks like for the world's poorest communities, whether solar risks replicating fossil fuel inequalities, and why Bill believes India is positioned to leapfrog the old energy order entirely. We also get into storage, panel efficiency, end-of-life recyclability, and why McKibben thinks hope — not outrage — is the more durable fuel for climate action.

Himalayas on Thin Ice: Prof Anil Kulkarni on the Himalayan Meltdown

The Himalayan glaciers are retreating, and the water, energy, and geopolitical futures of over a billion people hang in the balance. We begin Season 3 with Dr. Anil V. Kulkarni, one of the world's leading glaciologists and a pioneer in Himalayan cryosphere research, to understand what's really happening at the roof of the world. Dr. Kulkarni's career reads like a story of firsts. He was the first to use satellite data to track the retreat of nearly 1,900 Himalayan glaciers. He developed India's first glacier mass balance model and snow-melt runoff model, exposing how climate change is quietly eroding hydropower potential across seasons. And his research on mid-winter snowmelt has identified a chilling story of global warming hiding in plain sight. With an M.Tech in Applied Geology from IIT-Roorkee, an M.S in Geography from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, a Ph.D in Geology, Shivaji University, Kolhapur, and 40+ years watching the mountains change - this is THE episode for you to better understand our Himalayas.