Hello, my name is David Ronserman 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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This is a conversation I recorded with David Wallace-Wells. The Uninhabitable Earth is

the best-selling 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 Lanchist as 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. The difference between things that we think are unimaginable still

really matters. We started by talking about that. Is that the real message of this book,

the small differences matter? Yeah, I think that most, even people who are engaged on climate,

they tend to conceptualize it in these binary terms. Sometimes I get asked, is it here?

...