Climate Action: Uninhabitable Earth
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Just how bad will it get if the world fails to get to grips with climate change?
On day two of the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, Justin Rowlatt speaks to David Wallace-Wells, author of the apocalyptic book Uninhabitable Earth, which lays out the dire predictions of climatologists for the coming decades if humanity continues to put ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere unabated.
Yet despite the potentially terrifying outlook, it remains very difficult to motivate politicians and the public to take meaningful action to cut emissions. Why is that, and how might that change? Kelly Fielding is a social psychologist at the University of Queensland in Australia, and has some of the answers.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Dead bumblebee from the cover of Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells; Credit: FXseydlbast/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Justin Rowland. Be warned, today's program is going to frighten you. And so it should, because today we'll be looking at the effects of climate change. |
| 0:15.4 | In South Asia and the Middle East, there are going to be major cities that today are home to 10 or 12 or 15 million people |
| 0:21.5 | that by just 2050 will be unlivably hot in summer. |
| 0:25.4 | It is the greatest challenge facing humanity and it is urgent. |
| 0:29.9 | But are we psychologically kitted out to tackle it in time? |
| 0:34.5 | We start to really take notice when something starts to affect us in the here and now. |
| 0:38.4 | The problem that, of course, climate scientists would point out is that when we're finally kind |
| 0:42.5 | of really feeling the impacts, then it's too late. Today, we gaze into the inferno here on Business |
| 0:49.3 | Daily on the BBC. |
| 0:58.5 | I'm standing on the street just outside my office. |
| 0:59.8 | It's Tuesday afternoon. |
| 1:01.4 | It's all pretty ordinary. |
| 1:03.7 | Except actually no, |
| 1:06.5 | because what you can hear is, in geological terms, |
| 1:08.3 | absolutely extraordinary. |
| 1:12.9 | It's the sound of ancient carbon deposits being released back into the air at a speed and a scale that is unprecedented in our planet's history. Even within the brief |
| 1:20.0 | time span that humans have existed on Earth, our addiction to fossil fuels is a brand new habit. |
| 1:26.0 | And unless you've been living under a stone, you will know |
| 1:28.3 | it is not a healthy one. If you want to know just how unhealthy it is, the journalist David Wallace |
| 1:34.6 | Wells' book Uninhabitable Earth is not a bad place to start. His account is terrifying. But is that |
| 1:42.2 | just because he's trying to sell us his book? |
| 1:45.9 | The science is that terrifying. So mostly what I'm doing is summarizing what the best |
... |
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