What Is Climate Change? | Explained in Under 10 Minutes

The planet is warming. The science on that is settled. But how does it actually work — and why is it so hard to stop?Emma starts with the greenhouse effect itself: not a modern invention, but the reason Earth is habitable at all. Carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapour trap outgoing heat — and for hundreds of thousands of years, that balance kept temperatures stable. What's changed is the speed: we're adding CO₂ at a rate the planet hasn't seen in at least 3 million years.Neev walks through the feedback loops that make this so alarming — melting Arctic ice that reduces reflectivity, thawing permafrost releasing stored methane, warming oceans absorbing less CO₂. Lewis adds the human scale: the 2022 floods in Pakistan displaced 33 million people in a single season. That's not a future projection. That already happened.Emma closes with the one thing the science is clear on: the window for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is narrow, and narrowing fast. Understanding the mechanism is the first step to caring enough to act.If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe — and send your topic suggestions to [email protected]. We read every one.