Climate change is irrevocably altering the world as we know it, challenging our sense of the future and the fundamental values of our industrial societies. For two hundred years, we, in the west, have wagered the world that economic growth is the highest form of progress, burning more and more fossil fuels.

But today, the rapidly industrializing economies of India and China are forcing a reckoning with the western model of development as climate disruptions and global warming are hitting harder and faster than anyone predicted.

WEATHER REPORT takes us on a journey to the frontlines of our climate changing world in the Canadian Arctic, Montana, Northern Kenya, China and India, visiting communities and ordinary people whose lives and livelihoods are being impacted in the most dramatic ways.

All through the northwest of China the desert is on the move. Every spring dust storms tear through the area, burying hundreds of villages and kilometers of grassland in sand. Villagers in Inner Mongolia tell us they have been asked to leave but, for them, there is nowhere else to go. As they eke out a living on the edge of the desert, the dunes relentlessly move, destroying crops and agricultural land.

East Bench, Montana is in the sixth year of a fierce drought that has so depleted the local reservoir that authorities cut off water to certain areas. Harry, an irrigation worker takes us through the parched fields where irrigation pivots lay idle and little grows. If you can't feed yourself, he says, there is nothing else that matters.

When both the short and long rains failed in Northern Kenya, thousands of pastoralists were driven from their traditional grazing lands to seek sustenance in relief camps. In El Wak, on the Somalia border, we see the drought is having devastating and unexpected consequences as conflicts over grazing ground and water turn increasingly ugly and violent.

Drought isn't the only widespread impact of a changing climate. In Pangnirtung on Baffin Island, a sudden melt in the dead of winter destroyed all winter provisions. Out on the land, the hunters worry that the predictions of their elders that the earth is deteriorating are coming true. The prediction seems apparent in Mumbai where, an unprecedented monsoon cloudburst dumped 37 inches of rain in a single day, plunging the city into complete chaos.

These weather events are forcing the issue of our continued reliance on fossil fuels as the lifeblood of our economies and lifestyles. In North America, we are investing billions in the Alberta tar sands that will lock us into a fossil fuel future for the next thirty years. But there are alternatives. In India, we follow a company that is bringing the news of solar energy to the countryside and in London, we meet with the architects who are designing the world's first eco city, outside Shanghai.

The question, the film poses, is no longer whether climate change is happening but whether we ourselves can respond to the emergency in time to make a difference.