It's to the best of our knowledge.

I'm Anne Strain Champs.

One of the toughest things about trying to understand climate change is wrapping our minds around it.

And to even imagine something so enormous, so life-changing, we need a story.

And that's why in this hour, we turn to the novelists and

journalists who are telling the story of climate change, while we and our children live it.

That's one of the powerful things about novels is that it can suspend the unimaginable and

play it out without killing anyone.

I was trying to figure out, you know, why this dream came,

why dream turned into a book.

And actually, in a funny way, I think it's exactly because it's too difficult to think about.

It sort of forced its way through my unconscious instead.

This hour, writing the climate change story.

It's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Anne Strange Champs.

The Earth's climate has changed in ways that can't be put back.

And now we're looking at a future that is beyond most people's capacity

even to imagine. So how do we come to terms with the unthinkable?

In part, through fiction.

Writer Alice Bell kicks off today's show with a true story

of how just one summer of bad weather

changed the course of British literature.

There's the summer of 1816.

...