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A major climate conference in Copenhagen opens today, bringing together delegates from more than 100 countries with climate scientists, ahead of a United Nations summit in Paris next year. They are tasked with editing a major report, a draft of which was leaked to the press and apparently states that climate change could have, “serious, pervasive and irreversible,” impacts on human civilization. The news comes just days after the European Union agreed late last week to cut its emissions by 40% from 1990 levels by the year 2030. Despite the strength of such an action, it may still not come soon enough, or be drastic enough.

A new study published in Nature Geoscience yesterday confirms what countless others have shown: that climate change will be utterly devastating. Specifically, based on the results of a computer simulation, the study predicts that countries in Europe and Asia will be twice as likely to have colder and harsher winters than they do now.

Ninety seven percent of active climate scientists know that our planet is warming. And that we caused it through our overreliance on fossil fuels. What scientists also know is that unless we take radical steps now to curb our emissions, we are hurtling toward a dystopian future.

Author Naomi Klein wants to shape that future in a way that gives us the best shot at surviving in a warming climate, and finding justice and equity along the way. She lays out her plan in a new book called This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate. If the vast influence of her earlier book, the Shock Doctrine, is any indication, this new book by Klein does indeed change everything. It puts the onus of who is responsible for climate change squarely on the shoulders of our global capitalist system. And it makes the most compelling case to date for why dismantling capitalism must be a condition for surviving climate change.

GUEST: Naomi Klein is an award winning journalist and the author of the critically acclaimed #1 international best seller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. She is a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine, a reporter for Rolling Stone, and a syndicated columnist for the Nation and The Guardian. She is also a member of the board of directors of 350.org and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute. I spoke recently with Naomi Klein during her book tour.