page_title: Years of Living Dangerously
section_title: Episode summaries – season 1
hierarchical_section_title: Years of Living Dangerously / Episode summaries – season 1
caption_attribution_description: English: President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and their daughters, Sasha and Malia, sit for a family portrait in the Green Room of the White House, Sept. 1, 2009. Français&#160;: Le président Barack Obama, la First Lady Michelle Obama et leurs filles Sasha et Malia, assis dans la Green Room de la Maison Blanche pour un portrait de famille, 1er sept. 2009.
context_page_description: Years of Living Dangerously is an American documentary television series focusing on global warming. The first season was broadcast in the US in 2014 on Showtime. It won an Emmy Award as Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series. The second season aired on the National Geographic Channel in 2016. Executive producers included James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and series creators Joel Bach and David Gelber. Joseph Romm and Heidi Cullen were the chief science advisors.
  The weekly episodes featured celebrity hosts with a history of environmental activism and well-known journalists with a background in environmental reportage. These "correspondents" traveled the world and throughout the U.S. to interview experts and ordinary people affected by, and seeking solutions to, the effects of global warming. They acted as reporters and proxies for the audience, asking questions to find out people's opinions and to discover the scientific evidence. The final episode of season one featured an interview of President Barack Obama.
context_section_description: Episode 1, "Dry Season" (first aired on April 13, 2014): Don Cheadle reports on the severe droughts in the Southwest United States, following scientist and devout Christian, Katharine Hayhoe, as she speaks to religious audiences about the connection between extreme weather and climate change; Harrison Ford visits Indonesia to learn how slash-and-burn deforestation, driven by the global appetite for products like palm oil and paper, contributes a large portion of the world's carbon emissions; and Thomas Friedman investigates how drought contributed to the civil war in Syria. The UK organization Global Witness stated that although Ford's segment exposed the dangers of deforestation, executive producer Arnold Schwarzenegger owned an approximately 5% stake in Dimensional Fund Advisors, a firm that it said finances many of the world's largest logging companies.
  Episode 2, "End of the Woods" (April 20, 2014): Schwarzenegger accompanies the "hot shots", elite firefighters in Western US forests, as they risk their lives fighting the fire season made longer and more destructive by global warming, as fire regions expand from the southwest US further north into Canada. He learns that even more destruction is caused by the proliferation of bark beetles, as longer summers enable them to reproduce up to twice each year and kill trees with their toxic secretions. Meanwhile, Ford continues his quest to stop Indonesian deforestation and the carbon emissions and displacement of animals and people that it causes, confronting officials including Indonesia's forestry minister, Zulkifli Hasan, and its president, whom he persuades, with the help of the TV cameras, to take "real action". He also gets sustainability commitments from officers of Unilever, a major user of palm oil. We also see how Greenpeace and other environmental groups are making a real and positive difference.
  Episode 3, "The Surge" (April 27, 2014): Chris Hayes reports on how Superstorm Sandy affected towns and families; he meets with congressman Michael Grimm from New Jersey, initially a climate skeptic, who changes his position on global warming after reviewing the science and the work of fellow-Republican Bob Inglis. M. Sanjayan interviews scientists around the world about global warming and reviews the data that they are collecting about the effects of climate change around the world, for example at Christmas Island, where El Niños begin.
  Episode 4, "Ice & Brimstone" (May 4, 2014): Ian Somerhalder follows Anna Jane Joyner, the daughter of prominent Evangelical preacher, Rick Joyner, as she works to persuade congregations and preachers in North Carolina (including her skeptical father) to join the Evangelical fight against global warming and the Beyond Coal campaign to shut down a coal-fired power plant. They meet with Inglis, gulf coast workers, Hayhoe and former skeptical scientist Richard A. Muller, all of whom provide Rick with information about impacts of climate change. Anna asked her father for his support in an open letter in the Huffington Post, writing: "We are the first generation that knows how serious the stakes are, as well as the last to be able to do something about it in time. Lesley Stahl visits Greenland to investigate the effects of global warming in the Arctic on global sea levels and the rush to develop oil and gas reserves there. Greenland's ice is melting five times faster than it was 20 years ago, but businesses hope to gain trillions of dollars by exploiting the arctic. Scientist Heidi Cullen explains that "if we don’t leave 30 percent of our oil and gas reserves untapped, large parts of our planet will become unlivable." Stahl meets with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who has called climate change "perhaps the world's most fearsome weapon of mass destruction". Kerry says that, to make meaningful progress, "the people need to demand that our elected officials take responsible action to craft a real energy policy."
  Episode 5, "True Colors" (May 12, 2014): Olivia Munn learns about ocean acidification and the proposed West Coast coal export term
caption: Barack Obama with his wife and daughters (S1E9)
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