Hello, my name's David Rundsman and this is Talking Politics. This is an extra episode as part of our series about climate, and we're talking about the best-selling new book, The Uninhabitable Earth.

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forward slash talking.

This is a conversation I recorded with David Wallace Wells.

The Uninhabitable Earth is a bestseller, not just here in the States as well.

It's got, I think, probably more attention than any other book about climate that I can think of,

with the possible exception of John Lancaster's The Wall.

Part of the attention it's got is because it is frankly completely

terrifying. It's not about worst case scenarios. It's about where we might end up quite soon

on the current trajectory if we don't do anything to change. We recorded this conversation

a few weeks ago. David was in New York. I was in Cambridge.

We started by talking about one of the really distinctive features of this book. It's about

the absolute horror. One of the words that he uses is that he's describing a hellscape.

Some of it is unimaginably bad, but it's also about the relative horror part of the point he's making

is that every 0.1 degree centigrade of warming above where we are now could make a huge difference

and the difference between things that we think are unimaginable still really matters. So we started by talking about that.

Is that the real message of this book? The small differences matter? Yeah, I think that, you know,

most, even people who are engaged on climate, they tend to conceptualize it in these binary terms.

Sometimes I get asked, is it here? Is it over? Is it too late? Are we

fucked? It's all these yes or no questions. And the particular threshold of two degrees, which the

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