Hello, I'm Dana Taylor, and this is a special episode of the excerpt.

Climate change, global warming, we've all heard the steady drumbeat of doom.

But a recent five-year forecast by the World Meteorological Organization and the UK Meteorological Office puts it starkly.

The world will likely soon break another annual temperature record.

And according to the Associated Press, the heat will be deadly.

What would happen if we embrace the idea that the future still rests firmly in our hands?

Is it in our nature to learn, adapt, and change?

And equally important is there still time?

Author and climate scientist Kate Marvel dives into those questions in her new book, Human Nature,

on bookshelves for joining me, Kate. Oh, thank you so much for having me. In your work,

you manipulate climate models to gauge the impacts of climate change. In the simplest terms,

can you briefly walk us through the creation of one of these models and how you've

used them to glean data? So a climate model is basically a toy planet on a computer that we can do

experiments on that would be impossible or unethical to do in the real world. We can't gauge

human influence on the climate by asking everybody to go live on another planet

for a couple hundred years. But we can do that in the sort of safe digital confines of a climate

model. Now, what a climate model is is basically the encapsulation of everything we know about

the physics and chemistry of how the world works, written down in equations,

and then translated to code.

The most startling moments I experience while reading your book were when you were expressing

your anger regarding gaslighting by climate change deniers.

Was there a specific timbre point for you here?

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