Fear & Wonder is a new climate podcast, brought to you by The Conversation. It takes you inside the United Nations’ era-defining climate report via the hearts and minds of the scientists who wrote it. The show is sponsored by the Climate Council, an independent, evidence-based organisation working on climate science, impacts and solutions.

The show is hosted by Joelle Gergis, a climate scientist and lead author for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and her friend Michael Green, an award-winning journalist.

In this episode, Michael and Joelle introduce the series and look at observations of climate change over time – how we know the climate is changing. They cover what the IPCC is, what its monumental climate reports contain, how they're put together and what it feels like to be a climate scientist at this important juncture in the earth's history, with a bit of help from leading French scientist Valérie Masson-Delmotte.

They speak to Kim Cobb, a US-based paleoclimatologist, who describes the destruction of the coral reef she has researched her whole career in the El Niño event of 2016. They also chat to Ed Hawkins, who explains how reconstructions from past records are significantly improving what we know and how we model the present and future climate. He tells the story of a citizen science project to digitise the extraordinary weather records from the highest peak in the UK.

If you liked this episode, you might also like to subscribe to The Conversation's new Science Wrap newsletter: https://bit.ly/406nQgk. And if you really like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation – we're a non-profit newsroom who rely on the support of our readers to fund our expert-led journalism: https://bit.ly/42ABoCi.

If you'd like to support the Climate Council and receive your free copy of Joelle's book Humanity's Moment, click here: https://bit.ly/40sQ4BP.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.