How hot could our planet get? - The Climate Question podcast, BBC World Service

The more you know about the universe, the more you realise how much most of it sucks. All of the other planets that we know of are complete garbage, and the Earth is the only good place in the universe. And so just realising that and realising how beautiful and perfect this planet is just sort of fills me with a sense of wonder every day. We keep breaking temperature records, so how hot will the Earth get? We'll talk about the science with a top climate expert. And we'll be talking about something just as important as the science, how those facts make us feel. That's on the climate question from the BBC World Service. I'm Jordan Dunbar. And I'm Graihagh Jackson. Our climate expert is Professor Kate Marvel. Hi, Kate. Hi there, so excited to be here. Kate, I'm just going to go through your credits so you may want to prepare to bow or indeed blush because you're a climate scientist, an astrophysicist, a cosmologist, as well as a world expert in clouds. Yeah, so the sky actually isn't the limit for you, Kate. Well done, Graihagh. Thanks for that drum roll, Jordan. And so we've got loads of questions for you, especially about your new book, the human emotions, the nine things we can feel in response to our warming world. But first, I really want to dig into the science of climate change and how hot our planet might get because, indeed, you work at NASA. So, for this, we use climate models. Kate, what are climate models and how do they work? So a climate model is basically everything that we know about the physics and the chemistry of how the world works translated into equations and solved on big supercomputers. So you can think of a climate model as just a collection of equations. But you can also think of it as very literally a world building machine. Climate models run on stories. You take a story, so, for example, the story of recent history. And you translate that story into emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols and other pollutants.