This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator Books Podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

This week I'm joined by David Wallace Wells, who is the deputy editor of New York magazine.

He's over from the States, but he's also the author of a new book called The Uninhabitable

Earth, a Story of the Future. This is a book that really sums up a lot of what we know about

climate change, and it begins with the words, it is much, much worse than we think, all words

that effect. David, how worse than we think, all words of that effect.

David, how screwed are we?

Well, to me, it's all a matter of perspective.

So I don't think that there's much chance that we stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming,

which is what the scientists call the threshold of catastrophe.

And we're headed by the end of the century to about 4.3 degrees of Celsius.

Between those two poles, where we end up, how far along close to 4.3 and how close to 2 we get,

it's an entirely open question that is being determined every day by the way that we act.

This is not, you know, it's not a question that can be answered with science per se. It's a question that really is about what kind of action humans take and how quickly and at what scale.

And so I think it's a little bit hard to answer. It's really, it's a question for the political

sciences rather than the natural sciences.

I would say personally that without some dramatic intervention of what's called negative emissions technologies,

so by the simple path of replacing dirty energy sources with clean ones, we're unlikely to stay below even three degrees of warming by the end

of the century. And that would mean the total loss of just about all ice on the planet, which would

eventually raise seas by as much as 80 meters. It would mean that many of the biggest cities in the

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