Last year, the world experienced a significant jump — a rise in global temperature…

2014 was the hottest year on record, and just this week, a group of scientists moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock — that’s when mankind wipes out our own existence at midnight — to 11:57 pm. That’s the closest the clock has been to midnight since the height of the cold war.

One of the main reasons behind the move is climate change. 

But it’s still hard to get people to act differently, especially when the consequences for inaction seem so far off in the future. For politicians, creating policy that causes pain in the present and not seeing the payoff directly can seem like a bad decision. 

To explain some of the leaps that global governments and populations have to take to slow and stop climate change, we spoke to Ann Carlson, the co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA Law.

Listen to the whole segment in the player above.