I don't know about you, but reading science books and news and magazines has always been a kind of refuge for me.

You learn something new and surprising and there's like a dopamine hit when you figure out something about how the world works.

Science writing rewards curiosity, and that's why we all do this. We have so many questions,

and we get to talk to really smart people about them. But a lot of what I've read lately,

it's hard not to be discouraged. Public health, the environment, research funding, just the level

of misunderstanding and distrust driven by things that have nothing to do with science,

it's having a cumulative effect. And perhaps nothing at this moment feels as overwhelming as climate

change.

Welcome to the Quanta podcast where we explore the frontiers of fundamental science and math.

I'm Samir Patel, editor-in-chief of Quantum Magazine.

Because we cover fundamental science, the most foundational work about how the world and the universe

and life work, we're very interested in understanding how it is that we know what we know.

How do we know that a few parts per million of carbon dioxide is a problem?

What do those molecules actually do?

How do we know what the world will look like in 100 years or tens of millions of years ago?

Answering these basic questions was part of the inspiration

for our latest special issue called How We Came to Know Earth, the Achievement of Climate Science.

It dropped yesterday and here to talk through what readers will find there is the series editor

and our biology editor, Hannah Waters. Welcome back, Hannah.

Hi, Samir.

So what's the big idea we're going to be talking about today?

The big idea is that climate change can be frightening, but as scientists have worked to understand the climate,

...