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This is Fresh Air.

I'm Dave Davies and for Terry Gross.

World leaders are now meeting in Egypt for a major conference on climate change.

If you follow developments on global warming, you might be pretty pessimistic about our

planet's future.

You may think there's just never any good news.

We'll stick with us and you might hear something a little different.

Six years ago, my guest, David Wallace Wells, wrote an article in New York magazine called

the Uninhabitable Earth.

In it, he laid out some worst-case scenarios of what life on Earth might be like if we

continued the path we were on, releasing large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

He described drought and famine, intolerable heat and collapsing economies.

Some scientists took issue with his dire depictions of the future.

He was called an alarmist, some denounced his writings as climate porn.

Wallace Wells went on to write a best-selling book called the Uninhabitable Earth, and

he continues to believe that we should be alarmed about the climate.

But over the past several months, he's had dozens of conversations with climate scientists,

economists, policymakers, activists, novelists, and philosophers to assess where we are now.

He has some surprising new findings in a recent article he wrote in the New York Times magazine

called Beyond Catastrophe, a new climate reality is coming into view.

...