Cape Town's 'Day Zero,' and other stories of how climate change makes life hard

Want Climate Cast in your feed each week? Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

It's an extra doom-and-gloomy Climate Cast this week. But, hey, it's all true. Here's what's on the show.

The taps are about to run dry in Cape Town. Running out of water amid a drought is the frightening reality for the 4 million people living in Cape Town whose taps might shut off — and it's happening faster than anybody anticipated. We ask University of Cape Town geography professor Kevin Winter what it means to be facing "Day Zero."

The trials of farming in an inconsistent climate. Arlene Jones helps run a farm in Brainerd, Minn.. Each year, they have to mitigate a different risk: rain, cold, hail, etc. Those risks are just unpredictable now, though. "The problem is that you can't count on anything. So you're always trying to mitigate an unknown risk with climate change."

Polar bears need a lot of calories. It doesn't help them that their food is becoming more scarce by the day. Anthony Pagano with the University of California Santa Cruz researches how much energy polar bears in the Arctic use searching for food. He tells us the links between shrinking Arctic sea ice and polar bears. Check out a video of Pagano explaining his work below.

Raising a road isn't cheap. It'll cost $3.5 million to raise one mile of road one foot higher in the Florida Keys. And that only keeps the roads above rising sea levels until 2040. Who pays for it? A FEMA grant, funded by taxpayers. One might call it another climate change adaptation tax.

Use the audio player above to hear the show.