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00:00:00you are. Business on BBC News. Make
00:00:01Make the connection. MUSIC
00:00:13MUSIC Now Now on BBC News. Understanding the
00:00:15the future of our changing world world as the earth warms due to climate
00:00:19climate change. How hot could it
00:00:21it really get? Author Kate Marvel
00:00:24Marvel investigates in the climate
00:00:27climate question. The more you know
00:00:33know about the universe, the more more you realise how much most of
00:00:37of it sucks. All of the other planets
00:00:40planets that we know of are complete
00:00:42complete garbage, and the earth is
00:00:45is the only good place in the universe.
00:00:48universe. And so just realising that that and realising how beautiful
00:00:52beautiful and perfect this planet planet is just sort of fills me with
00:00:55with a sense of wonder every day.
00:00:57day. We keep breaking temperature
00:01:00temperature records. So how hot will will the earth get? We'll talk about
00:01:03about the science with a top climate climate expert. And we'll be talking
00:01:06talking about something just as important
00:01:09important as the science, how those those facts make us feel. That's
00:01:12That's on the climate question from from the BBC World Service. I'm Jordan
00:01:16Jordan Dunbar. And I'm Graihagh Jackson.
00:01:23Jackson. Our climate expert is Professor
00:01:25Professor Kate Marvel. Hi, Kate. Kate. Hi there. So excited to be
00:01:29be here. Kate, I'm just gonna go go through your credits. You may
00:01:31may want to prepare to buy or indeed
00:01:33indeed blush because you're a climate
00:01:36climate scientist, an astrophysicist, astrophysicist, a cosmologist as
00:01:39as well as a world expert in clouds. clouds. Yeah. So this guy actually
00:01:43actually isn't the limit for you, you, Kate. Well done Greg. Thanks Thanks for that. Drumroll, Jordan.
00:01:47Jordan. So we've got loads of questions questions for you, especially about
00:01:50about your new book, The Human Emotions
00:01:53Emotions The Nine Things We Can Feel
00:01:55Feel in Response to Our Warming World. World. But first, I really want to
00:01:58to dig into the science of climate
00:02:00climate change and how hot our planet
00:02:03planet might get because indeed you
00:02:05you work at Nasa. So for this we
00:02:09we use climate models. Kate, what
00:02:11what are climate models and how do do they work? So a climate model
00:02:15model is basically everything that
00:02:17that we know about the physics and
00:02:19and the chemistry of how the world
00:02:22world works. Translated into equations
00:02:24equations and solved on big supercomputers.
00:02:27supercomputers. So you can think think of a climate model as just
00:02:31just a collection of equations, but
00:02:33but you can also think of it as very
00:02:36very literally a world building machine.
00:02:39machine. Climate models run on stories.
00:02:41stories. You take a story. So for
00:02:43for example, the story of recent recent history and you translate
00:02:47translate that story into emissions emissions of greenhouse gases and
00:02:51and aerosols and other pollutants. pollutants. And you tell that story
00:02:54story to the climate model. And the the climate model will spit out a
00:02:58a world. It'll tell you what the
00:03:00the temperature is, what the rainfall
00:03:03rainfall patterns look like. And And this is really useful because
00:03:05because you can tell the climate climate model counterfactual stories.
00:03:09stories. You can say, what if we
00:03:11we never existed? What if we don't
00:03:14don't check our emissions? What was was the world like back in the last
00:03:17last ice age? And it will spit out out the worlds. And so that's the
00:03:21the way that that I like to think think about what climate models are
00:03:25are showing us. And where do you
00:03:27you get all of the like characters characters for those climate stories?
00:03:31stories? Do they come from the past? past? Where do you get the ingredients ingredients for those to make the
00:03:35the predictions? Oh, that's such such a good question. So I am a total
00:03:39total boring pedant on this. Climate Climate models don't make predictions.
00:03:43predictions. They make projections projections and what that means. means. The really crucial difference
00:03:46difference is predictions are saying
00:03:48saying this is what will happen.
00:03:50happen. And a projection is conditional. conditional. A projection is if we
00:03:54we do this then this will happen. happen. And so when somebody says
00:03:58says climate models predict that
00:04:00that in the year 2100, everything everything is going to be completely
00:04:04completely apocalyptic or climate climate models predict that in the
00:04:06the year 2100 everything will be
00:04:08be fine. Those are conditional. Those
00:04:11Those are conditional on the stories stories that are told to the climate
00:04:15climate model. And so, for example,
00:04:18example, in that future, that apocalyptic apocalyptic future that is conditional.
00:04:21conditional. That's a projection projection conditional on human beings
00:04:25beings not getting emissions under under control. I know that models
00:04:28models broadly say that the more more of these planet warming gases
00:04:31gases like carbon dioxide there is is in the sky, the warmer our planet
00:04:34planet gets. But it's actually a
00:04:37a very complicated world that you're you're having to build. And there
00:04:41there are some things that might might accelerate climate change.
00:04:44change. But also there are other other things, mechanisms, natural
00:04:47natural feedbacks that might be putting putting the brakes or even reversing
00:04:50reversing climate change. And could could you talk us through some of of those processes like plants, say,
00:04:54say, for instance, and how that works works in a very complicated model
00:04:58model like the ones you were describing.
00:05:02describing. So my job, if I could could describe it really succinctly,
00:05:05succinctly, is to figure out how how hot it's going to get. And when
00:05:09when you say, you know, we don't don't know how hot it's going to to get, people are like what climate
00:05:12climate scientists like you guys guys had one job, you know, come
00:05:15come on, how you don't know that?
00:05:17that? And the reason one of the reasons reasons that we don't know exactly
00:05:20exactly how hot it's going to get get is we've never done this experiment
00:05:24experiment before. We've never kicked
00:05:26kicked the earth this hard. And so
00:05:29so we don't really know exactly how
00:05:32how it's going to react. We do know know because it is such basic physics
00:05:35physics that we have known since since the 19th century that putting
00:05:38putting a bunch of greenhouse gases gases in the atmosphere increases
00:05:41increases the temperature of the the planet and the primary greenhouse
00:05:44greenhouse gas that we're emitting
00:05:45emitting is carbon dioxide. About
00:05:48About half of the carbon dioxide dioxide that human beings put in
00:05:51in the atmosphere gets taken out
00:05:54out of the atmosphere by stuff that
00:05:56that photosynthesises basically plants plants and phytoplankton. And the
00:06:00the thing is, there's no guarantee guarantee that they're going to continue
00:06:03continue doing that into the future.
00:06:06future. It's really hard as a forest forest to take carbon dioxide out
00:06:10out of the atmosphere when you're you're on fire. So we know that as
00:06:13as the climate changes, the ability
00:06:15ability of stuff to grow on the Earth's
00:06:17Earth's surface is going to change.
00:06:19change. And what that means is that
00:06:22that the more of the CO2 that we
00:06:24we emit in the future might be staying
00:06:27staying up there in the atmosphere, atmosphere, warming the planet. So
00:06:30So we don't know how much of our our CO2 is going to stay in the future
00:06:34future atmosphere. And a lot of that that is because we don't know how how plants are going to do. But then
00:06:38then we also don't know how that that CO2 is going to warm up the
00:06:42the planet. And that's because we
00:06:45we don't exactly know what kind of
00:06:47of changes to the whole earth system system that's going to provoke. So
00:06:50So one of the big wild cards there there is clouds. We don't know how
00:06:54how clouds are going to rearrange rearrange themselves in order to
00:06:56to speed up or slow down the warming.
00:07:00warming. We are fairly certain, though, though, that there is no kind of
00:07:03of natural emergency brake. Our best best estimate of what plants are
00:07:06are going to do, what we call carbon carbon cycle feedbacks is that that's
00:07:10that's going to lead to more CO2
00:07:12CO2 in the atmosphere. And our best best estimate of what clouds are
00:07:15are going to do is a destabilising destabilising feedback, something
00:07:18something that makes global warming warming worse. And is that why you you have so many different climate
00:07:22climate models? It's not like you you just have a few. You have lots
00:07:25lots of different ones to try and and bring in all these variables
00:07:29variables completely. Yeah. So when when we think about a climate model,
00:07:32model, which is just like a computer computer representation of reality,
00:07:36reality, right? If that is completely
00:07:38completely perfect, if that is able
00:07:40able to exactly represent reality,
00:07:43reality, that's literally the matrix,
00:07:45matrix, right? And that's impossible. impossible. And that's creepy. And
00:07:48And we don't really want that. Right? Right? And so climate models, like
00:07:52like all scientific models are necessarily
00:07:56necessarily approximations of reality. reality. We know how clouds work.
00:07:59work. But the thing is clouds are
00:08:01are formed when little tiny water
00:08:04water droplets or ice crystals coagulate coagulate around, you know, dust
00:08:08dust grains or little bits of sea
00:08:10sea salt or whatever. And in order
00:08:12order to get that completely accurately, accurately, you would need a computer
00:08:16computer that is capable of tracking tracking every single little dust,
00:08:19dust, grain and water droplet in
00:08:21in the entire atmosphere. We don't
00:08:24don't have computers that powerful. powerful. And so as a result, we
00:08:27we have to make kind of approximations.
00:08:29approximations. We have to say when
00:08:31when this happens, clouds do this this and there are different climate
00:08:34climate modelling groups all over over the world who are all making
00:08:38making kind slightly different choices, choices, different physically defensible
00:08:42defensible approximations. And when when we compare all of those different different climate models together,
00:08:46together, we get kind of an understanding
00:08:49understanding of what is really solid,
00:08:51solid, what we completely get and and what there still uncertainty
00:08:54uncertainty in. You've mentioned
00:08:58mentioned clouds a couple of times
00:08:59times there, Kate. Why are they so
00:09:03so important here? Clouds are so so I wish I didn't have to think
00:09:06think about clouds. I am a Californian.
00:09:11Californian. I love perfect weather.
00:09:14weather. I get really mad when the
00:09:16the temperature drops below 20 Celsius.
00:09:19Celsius. Don't come to England. Oh,
00:09:20Oh, it's in the sky. So so I don't
00:09:24don't want to have to care about about clouds, but I kind of have
00:09:27have to. And that's because they're
00:09:30they're incredibly important in regulating regulating the climate system. So
00:09:33So the thing about clouds is that
00:09:36that they have this dual effect. effect. They both cool the planet
00:09:40planet by blocking sunlight and they they warm the planet because they
00:09:43they have their own greenhouse effect.
00:09:45effect. Right now, the unit that
00:09:47that scientists use to measure kind kind of the energy imbalance of the
00:09:51the planet, how much it's out of of whack is what's like in a light
00:09:55light bulb per square metre. And
00:09:57And our best estimate of the what
00:10:00what happens when we double carbon
00:10:02carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
00:10:06atmosphere? That's around 4W/m2. 4W/m2. When we look at what clouds
00:10:10clouds are doing, clouds are blocking
00:10:12blocking our cooling the planet by
00:10:15by about 50W per square metre. At
00:10:18At the same time, they're also warming
00:10:20warming the planet by about 25W/m2.
00:10:2425W/m2. So they do two things at
00:10:25at once. They're incredibly powerful
00:10:28powerful and they're really, really really difficult to get right in
00:10:30in a climate model because it's this this scale mismatch. It's the fact
00:10:34fact that you have to understand understand what's happening at the
00:10:36the very small scales, but then you you also have to get what's happening
00:10:40happening at global scales. So what what do those projections tell us
00:10:44us then about how hot the earth might
00:10:46might get? So I would say the number
00:10:50number one thing we can take away
00:10:52away from that is actually the biggest
00:10:55biggest uncertainty in how hot the the planet will get is what human
00:10:59human beings are going to do. The
00:11:02The emissions scenario, basically basically what we call the story
00:11:06story about what human societies societies will choose to do, whether
00:11:08whether we will choose to increase increase our emissions, keep them
00:11:12them flat or decrease them. That That is the largest reason that we
00:11:16we don't know how hot it's going going to get. But even when you just
00:11:19just look at the physical science science uncertainty, even when you
00:11:22you just look at what we know about about the physics of how the earth
00:11:26earth will respond, we are fairly
00:11:29fairly certain that the net aggregate aggregate impact of these what we
00:11:33we call cloud feedbacks, is going
00:11:36going to be destabilising. It's going going to make the warming worse.
00:11:40worse. Our best estimate of what what plants are going to do. These
00:11:43These carbon cycle feedbacks is that's that's going to lead to more CO2
00:11:47CO2 building up in the atmosphere. atmosphere. That's going to make make warming worse. I feel like I'm
00:11:51I'm in this really unique position
00:11:53position as a scientist because this this you know, I have this research research question. How hot is it
00:11:57it going to get? And I don't want
00:12:00want to know the answer to that research research question. Even though it's
00:12:03it's important to study the physics physics of how the earth system reacts.
00:12:06reacts. I don't want to do that experiment. experiment. I think we shouldn't.
00:12:10shouldn't. But Kate, if I may push
00:12:12push back a little bit on that, surely
00:12:14surely we need to know the trajectory
00:12:16trajectory we're heading in, in order
00:12:19order to adapt. Oh, absolutely. You
00:12:21You know, I am very pro-science. pro-science. I am very pro doing
00:12:25doing science, figuring out how the the earth works. And I think you're
00:12:29you're absolutely right that that that is relevant no matter what the
00:12:33the future looks like because no
00:12:35no climate change is unfortunately unfortunately not on the table. We're
00:12:39We're almost certainly going to blow
00:12:43blow past the 1.5 Celsius target. target. We're almost certainly going
00:12:46going to warm far more than that.
00:12:49that. And even if we were to stop
00:12:52stop emissions tomorrow, the temperature temperature of the planet would probably
00:12:55probably stabilise. But the ocean
00:12:58ocean is not done catching up. So
00:13:00So there is a lot of baked in sea
00:13:03sea level rise already. And so you you are absolutely right that it
00:13:06it is completely crucial to understand
00:13:09understand the physics of the earth earth system, the processes that
00:13:12that are underlying that in order order to make decisions in the future. future. What I was saying is that
00:13:16that worst case scenario, I don't don't want to do that experiment.
00:13:19experiment. I don't want to have have experimental evidence of what
00:13:22what the world looks like under the the worst case scenario. I just wanted
00:13:26wanted to get in my head a couple couple of things straight from what
00:13:29what you've been talking about. There's There's uncertainty because of all
00:13:32all these different variables and and how complex it is in these projections,
00:13:36projections, not predictions, projections projections that we're making the
00:13:39the future never predictions. But But can you talk just very simply
00:13:42simply about the certainty we have have of how the planet is warming?
00:13:46warming? Exactly. So I want to be
00:13:49be very clear that uncertainty is
00:13:51is not the same thing as ignorance.
00:13:54ignorance. We don't know everything, everything, but that does not mean
00:13:57mean we know nothing. And as a scientist,
00:14:00scientist, I like to talk about uncertainty uncertainty because that's where
00:14:03where my head is all day. That's
00:14:05That's my job. If we figured out out all of science, I would have
00:14:09have to find something else to do do with my life. And I don't want
00:14:12want to do that. So there is uncertainty.
00:14:16uncertainty. But you're absolutely absolutely correct that there is
00:14:18is complete and total certainty in
00:14:20in some things. The fact that carbon
00:14:24carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas,
00:14:25gas, methane is a greenhouse gas
00:14:28gas and greenhouse gases warm the
00:14:30the planet. This is incredibly well
00:14:33well established science. We have
00:14:35have known this stuff since the 1800s,
00:14:381800s, and the science has only gotten gotten more solid from there. So
00:14:42So I don't think I think we need need to be aware that uncertainty
00:14:44uncertainty is often weaponised against against us. People often say, oh,
00:14:48oh, well, the science is unsettled. unsettled. Therefore we don't have
00:14:51have to do anything. The science science does have big uncertainties
00:14:55uncertainties in the future. You You know, we've never done this experiment experiment before. We don't know
00:14:58know exactly what's going to happen,
00:15:01happen, but we are more sure that
00:15:03that greenhouse gases cause the climate climate to change than we are that
00:15:07that smoking causes cancer. Wow. Wow. I'm fascinated because we've
00:15:11we've been talking about climate climate modelling and variables and
00:15:14and data and you're a climate scientist, scientist, but you've written a book
00:15:18book called Human Nature Nine Ways
00:15:19Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet.
00:15:22Planet. Why did you want to link
00:15:26link emotions with climate science? science? Because to me, one is so
00:15:28so data driven and kind of rational.
00:15:32rational. Yeah, I was really uneasy
00:15:34uneasy for a while because I did
00:15:37did feel things about the earth.
00:15:39earth. I have a conflict of interest interest because I live on the thing
00:15:43thing that I study and I do care. care. I do care what happens to it.
00:15:47it. And but for a long time I thought, thought, oh, I shouldn't have these
00:15:51these feelings because I'm a scientist, scientist, I'm rational. I am data
00:15:55data driven. And as scientists, we
00:15:58we are trained to say, oh, we don't don't have any feelings. We don't
00:16:01don't have any emotions because supposedly supposedly that is supposed to make
00:16:05make people believe us more if we we are completely objective scientific
00:16:08scientific robots. And then it kind
00:16:10kind of hit me. I realised that,
00:16:12that, oh, pretending we don't have
00:16:15have any emotions, that doesn't make
00:16:18make us more objective, that makes
00:16:19makes us liars. And I don't want
00:16:22want to be a liar. And then I kind
00:16:24kind of realised that, oh, there
00:16:28there is no tension between getting
00:16:29getting the science right and having having feelings about what you're
00:16:33you're seeing and what you're studying.
00:16:36studying. You can feel sad or joyful
00:16:39joyful or angry and at the same time time you can get the math right.
00:16:42right. There's no tension for me me between those two. And I think
00:16:45think when we talk about climate
00:16:47climate change, oftentimes just talking talking about the data, just talking
00:16:51talking about the equations and the the graphs. And don't get me wrong,
00:16:54wrong, I love equations, I love graphs, graphs, but we scientists have this
00:16:58this tendency to be like, oh, just just one more graph and people will
00:17:00will believe us. And that's not how
00:17:02how people work, right? People respond
00:17:05respond to emotions. People respond respond to stories. And so what I
00:17:08I wanted to do was talk in that sort
00:17:11sort of language in the hopes that that it would resonate with more
00:17:14more people. What was the turning
00:17:16turning point for you? Why did you you suddenly decide, OK, I've got
00:17:20got to do this. I've got to talk talk about this as well. I think
00:17:23think one of the turning points was
00:17:24was having a kid. When you're a scientist,
00:17:28scientist, it's very easy to compartmentalise. compartmentalise. It's very easy
00:17:31easy to study climate model projections
00:17:34projections of what's going to happen happen in 2050, because that feels
00:17:38feels very abstract, that feels very very far away. And then when you
00:17:41you have a kid and you realise, no
00:17:44no 2050 is his adulthood, then things things start to become really concrete
00:17:48concrete in a way that maybe you you knew intellectually before, but
00:17:52but now you feel very profoundly. profoundly. I think a lot of times,
00:17:56times, and I'm sure you guys have have run into this to a lot of times
00:17:59times climate coverage is really really designed to try to make you
00:18:03you feel one thing, right? You're You're supposed to feel really freaked
00:18:07freaked out or really, really angry angry or just really, really sad
00:18:11sad at what we're losing or maybe maybe hopeful that there are things
00:18:15things that we can do about this.
00:18:17this. And I got really frustrated
00:18:20frustrated at kind of the implication implication that there was only one
00:18:23one thing that you could feel about
00:18:25about climate change because fundamentally fundamentally this is the whole planet
00:18:28planet changing. This is everything everything that we know, everything
00:18:32everything that we love. And how
00:18:34how on earth can you have only one
00:18:36one feeling about that? That's really really impossible. And so sometimes, sometimes, you know, people are like,
00:18:40like, how do you feel about climate climate change? And it's like, oh, oh, I don't know. I feel all the
00:18:44the feelings and I feel them all all really strongly. In the book
00:18:47book you've written about grief, grief, could you tell us about some
00:18:49some of the things that you've seen seen change and that you are grieving?
00:18:53grieving? Yeah. So I live in New
00:18:54New York City now, but I am a Californian
00:18:58Californian by birth and my heart
00:19:01heart is in California. I lived in
00:19:04in Northern California, which is
00:19:06is objectively the most beautiful beautiful place on the planet. But
00:19:10But when you talk about California
00:19:12California and climate change, what
00:19:14what comes to mind? It's change.
00:19:17change. It's destruction, it's fires.
00:19:20fires. One of my most beloved parts
00:19:23parts of California is the Sequoia
00:19:25Sequoia groves. These trees are incredible.
00:19:27incredible. They have seen so much.
00:19:29much. They have been around for thousands
00:19:32thousands of years, and we tend to
00:19:34to think of them as indestructible.
00:19:37indestructible. And they have been been indestructible for their entire
00:19:40entire long history. They're very very resistant to fire. In fact,
00:19:44fact, they need fire. Fire helps helps them grow. Fire helps them
00:19:47them spread. But now the fires are
00:19:50are changing. The summers are hotter.
00:19:52hotter. The winters are wetter and
00:19:55and there's more fuel and there's there's more fire weather so that
00:19:58that the fuel can go up in flames.
00:20:01flames. And this is creating conditions conditions that make it very hard
00:20:05hard for these things that have survived
00:20:08survived for centuries and centuries centuries to continue into the future.
00:20:11future. And so knowing the connection connection between what's happening
00:20:15happening in the atmosphere, which
00:20:17which can seem so far away and so
00:20:20so abstract, and just seeing how how it is affecting these things things that you grew up thinking
00:20:24thinking would be there forever is
00:20:27is is very quietly devastating. I I think. Your book is about nine
00:20:30nine emotions. Can you talk me through
00:20:34through those nine emotions? So I
00:20:35I wanted to start out with wonder
00:20:38wonder because that for me is the the emotion that I feel the most
00:20:41most every day. I'm a scientist.
00:20:43scientist. It is my job to find out
00:20:45out new things about this planet. planet. And I used to be an astrophysicist.
00:20:49astrophysicist. I used to be a cosmologist cosmologist and it was my job to
00:20:53to study the entire universe. And And then the more you know about
00:20:57about the universe, the more you
00:20:59you realise how much most of it sucks.
00:21:02sucks. All of the other planets that that we know of are complete garbage,
00:21:05garbage, and the earth is the only
00:21:08only good place in the universe.
00:21:11universe. And so just realising that that and realising how beautiful
00:21:15beautiful and perfect this planet planet is just sort of fills me with
00:21:18with a sense of wonder every day.
00:21:20day. And then the second chapter
00:21:22chapter is anger because you see
00:21:25see the world changing. You know know how well-established the science
00:21:29science is and you see people lying lying about that. And that makes
00:21:33makes me angry. And then I talk about
00:21:36about guilt. I talk about fear. I
00:21:40I talk about grief. But then I also
00:21:43also wanted to talk about maybe the
00:21:45the more positive emotions. So surprise,
00:21:50surprise, pride, both in the sense sense of hubris, but also in the
00:21:53the sense of we know what to do. do. And there is, I think, something
00:21:56something important in feeling pride
00:21:57pride in a job well done. And then
00:22:01then hope, an emotion that I think think all climate people have really
00:22:04really complicated relationships relationships with. And then I felt
00:22:07felt very strongly about ending the
00:22:09the book on love because that is
00:22:12is the reason that any of this matters. matters. Can you talk to me about
00:22:15about that complicated relationship relationship you have with Hope? Hope? What is it that's giving? Yeah,
00:22:18Yeah, because I was going to say say a lot of people look to the future, future, don't they? And they have
00:22:22have fear. They have anxiety about
00:22:23about what's to come. But hope. Yeah.
00:22:26Yeah. Is that what you see when you you look to the future? We know what
00:22:30what to do. And so if we want to
00:22:33to avoid the worst, if we want to to build a better future, we know
00:22:36know what to do. I actually find
00:22:39find a lot of hope and comfort in
00:22:42in how solid the science is. We know
00:22:45know exactly what is causing climate climate change, and that means that
00:22:49that we know exactly how to stop
00:22:50stop it. And so that is the thing
00:22:53thing that gives me a kind of active,
00:22:56active, motivating hope. You say
00:22:57say we know what we need to do, but
00:23:01but what is that exactly? Yeah. So
00:23:03So from a, you physical science perspective
00:23:06perspective up in the atmosphere, atmosphere, it's really simple. Climate
00:23:09Climate change is caused by greenhouse greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases
00:23:12gases are emitted by humans to stop
00:23:14stop climate change. Stop doing that.
00:23:17that. Now obviously that is much
00:23:19much easier said than done, but I
00:23:21I think it helps to zoom in and to
00:23:25to look at where we are, where those
00:23:27those emissions are coming from right?
00:23:29right? Those emissions are coming
00:23:31coming from the way we get around around from transportation. They're
00:23:35They're coming from the way that that we generate electricity. They're
00:23:38They're coming from the way that
00:23:40that we use land and farm and make
00:23:44make our food. They're coming from
00:23:45from the way we heat buildings and
00:23:48and cook that food. And they're coming
00:23:50coming from the way we make stuff. stuff. Industrial processes. And
00:23:53And when you break it down to that that level of granularity, you start
00:23:57start to realise, oh, there is a
00:24:00a solution for nearly every part
00:24:03part of that puzzle. Electricity.
00:24:06Electricity. Well, we have different different ways to make electricity.
00:24:09electricity. When you think about
00:24:10about fossil fuels, what they really
00:24:13really are is solar energy, but stupid.
00:24:16stupid. So you can either make electricity
00:24:20electricity from solar energy directly
00:24:22directly with solar panels or you
00:24:25you can use that solar energy to
00:24:26to make a plant photosynthesise eventually eventually that plant gets eaten
00:24:30eaten and the thing that ate it dies dies or the plant dies and it's got
00:24:34got the remnants of that last meal meal still in it. And then you wait
00:24:38wait hundreds of millions of years years and then you dig up and you
00:24:40you set it on fire. So we can either either use sunlight in that really
00:24:43really indirect way, or we can use
00:24:46use sunlight in a direct way. The
00:24:48The world has changed so much since
00:24:50since the beginning of my career.
00:24:53career. If you had told me when I
00:24:54I first started in climate science
00:24:58science that eventually solar it it won't be a boutique niche energy
00:25:02energy source for hippies, it's going going to be the cheapest way of generating
00:25:05generating electricity in all of
00:25:07of history. They're going to be cheap cheap electric cars, and they're
00:25:11they're going to be better than gas
00:25:13gas powered cars. Battery storage
00:25:16storage prices are going to be plummeting. plummeting. If you had told me all
00:25:19all of those things, I would think, think, no, no, no, there's no possible
00:25:22possible way that that can be true. true. That's just, you know, that's
00:25:25that's way, way, way too optimistic.
00:25:28optimistic. So we have solutions solutions for generating electricity.
00:25:31electricity. We have solutions for for transportation. And I could go
00:25:35go on and on and on, but for every
00:25:38every single aspect, every single single area where emissions come
00:25:42come from, we have the vast majority majority of the solutions that we
00:25:45we need to do that differently. Professor
00:25:47Professor Kip Marvel, thank you so so much for joining us today. Thank
00:25:51Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you you so much. Really appreciate it.
00:25:54it. And thank you for watching. And And don't forget you can subscribe
00:25:58subscribe to the BBC World Service Service YouTube channel so you don't
00:26:00don't miss a thing. And if you have have a climate question of your own
00:26:03own that you'd like us to answer, answer, we have a listener's question
00:26:06question show coming up very soon.
00:26:08soon. We'll see you next time.
00:28:22Trump's plan to get the oil flowing flowing again, one that will pay
00:28:25pay off? Join us on Talking Business
00:28:28Business weekly on BBC News. I lost
00:28:35lost my
00:28:39I lost my sight completely when I was eight years old. This is a a moment in the history of the United
00:28:43United States. My name is Gary O'Donoghue O'Donoghue and I'm the chief North North America correspondent for the
00:28:46the BBC. As you can see, we're on on the ground behind our car, which
00:28:49which is not ideal, but that's the the shelter we have at the moment
00:28:53moment during the Trump assassination assassination attempt. I think my
00:28:55my blindness was an interesting factor factor because one of the central
00:28:58central interviews we got was with with the eyewitness, Greg. I learned
00:29:02learned afterwards look pretty striking. striking. Secret service is looking looking at us from the top of the
00:29:06the barn. I'm pointing at that roof. roof. You spend your whole life interpreting
00:29:09interpreting the world through what what you hear. Because I can't see.
00:29:12see. I just listen to what he says. says. I listened and I asked the the same questions over and over
00:29:15over again. He remained consistent. consistent. He sounded credible. credible. It was the thing that persuaded
00:29:19persuaded me his listening and telling telling stories. That is the core
00:29:22core of what we do. We get the experience experience of all people we serve
00:29:26serve because we have people of all
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00:30:13Live from Washington. This is
00:30:16BBC News. Ukraine's president repeats
00:30:18repeats his plea for more missiles
00:30:20missiles to intercept air strikes strikes after another deadly Russian
00:30:23Russian attack just outside the capital,
00:30:26capital, Kyiv, as cases of Ebola
00:30:29Ebola pass 4000 in D.r.congo. The
00:30:31The head of Africa CDC tells the
00:30:33the BBC the outbreak could become
00:30:36become the largest the world has
00:30:38has ever seen and football's world
00:30:40world governing body Fifa responds responds as questions mount about
00:30:44about president Gianni Infantino.
00:30:46Infantino. Personal and professional
00:30:48professional conduct.
00:30:59Helena Humphrey. Good to have