201st Birthday Bonanza - Mel Giedroyc, Deborah Meaden and Nish Kumar

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Speaker 1 only 10 more presents to wrap.

Speaker 7 You're almost at the finish line.

Speaker 1 But first.

Speaker 7 There, the last one.

Speaker 3 Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that

Speaker 3 refreshes.

Speaker 8 BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Speaker 9 You're about to listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays, wherever you get your podcast.
But if you're in the UK, the full series is available right now.

Speaker 1 First on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Brian Cox.
I'm Robin Inks, and this is the 201st Infinite Monkey Cage.

Speaker 9 16 years

Speaker 9 of searching for answers to some of the most important questions in science. What is death? Are we living in a simulation? How did life on Earth begin?

Speaker 1 What is the point of pandas? Is there any whatsoever? And is quantum theory just woo?

Speaker 9 I'll just stop you there.

Speaker 1 Why are you going to stop me? Pandas, pointless, they get in the way.

Speaker 1 Though actually, I should say, later on in this series, you will hear a discussion about whether pandas would have more sex if they were on the International Space Station at that particular episode.

Speaker 1 Now, when we began, of course, Brian was just plain old Professor Brian Cox, then he became Brian Cox OBE, then he became OBE FRS, and now he is CBE FRS, and also, of course, won Rear of the Year in

Speaker 1 2017 in the science communication category.

Speaker 1 I, of course, when this began, I was just plain old Robin Ince, whereas now I am Robin Ince, winner of Richard Osmond's House of Games and owner of a B hotel.

Speaker 1 I've got a B hotel, Richard Osman luggage, and a selection of things that I can keep eggs in.

Speaker 1 The time will come. Yeah.
Oh, no, I think that's it. That's all I want.

Speaker 9 Now, for our 201st birthday show, we've decided to do something special, and it should admittedly have been the 200th, but we missed it.

Speaker 9 We've invited three celebrity guests who have burning questions about science and engineering, and perhaps unfashionably, in today's intellectual and political climate, we've also invited a panel of experts to answer them.

Speaker 1 So, to explore what they've always wanted to know, the burning questions we have on this birthday episode, a discerning dragon, a cake commissar, and a mash master. And they are.

Speaker 8 Hi, I'm Mel Gedreich. I'm the cake commissar.

Speaker 8 And the first question that I ever wanted to ask my my science teacher, Mrs. Stone, I have not changed her name for legal reasons.
That was her actual name. Brian, she was my physics teacher.

Speaker 8 The question I want to ask her, as I was then, age 14,

Speaker 8 why did you kick me out of my physics class?

Speaker 9 And have you got no inkling of why she kicked you out?

Speaker 8 I do have a bit of an inkling.

Speaker 1 You probably don't know about Mel, right? Mel created a little plot against Mrs. Stone with the art teacher, Miss Paper, and

Speaker 1 Mr. Rock.

Speaker 8 No, it's fair to say that I did, I don't know if this is Radio 4 friendly, I did tit about quite a lot in Mrs. Stone's classes.
But I thought, come on, man, why did they do that to me, Brian?

Speaker 9 Because you titted about in the classes.

Speaker 1 What level of titting are we talking about here?

Speaker 8 It's really lame, but the thing that was the sort of last straw on the camel's back, aka Mrs. Stone, she did spit a bit as well, actually.

Speaker 8 She did spit a bit like a camel.

Speaker 8 But physics was on a Tuesday afternoon, and showing on Tuesday evenings on ITV was Bride's Head Revisited. And I used to sing the theme tune in the physics class quite loudly.

Speaker 1 Do you like to do it now?

Speaker 1 Two things.

Speaker 9 Firstly, I would have kicked you out for that.

Speaker 12 Secondly, this is Radio 4, we can't afford the publishing.

Speaker 1 You can use the first eight seconds, that's copyright free.

Speaker 1 What in the name of God is going on here? I don't know. It was like being the Manchurian candidate for people over 45.
People in the audience just started going,

Speaker 1 Anyway, I wonder who our next guest is.

Speaker 1 Our next guest is scared and confused.

Speaker 1 My name is Nish Kumar. I am a stand-up comedian and the co-host of Pod Save the UK.
And the question I would like to have asked my science teacher was on the first day of science, what is science?

Speaker 1 Because I was really bad at it. I was such a bad student.
And so I'm here. I'm excited to be here, but I'm also, I should not be here.

Speaker 8 Science till you were 16.

Speaker 13 Some of us 14.

Speaker 1 At least that's because I wasn't there going

Speaker 1 we could do the Doctor theme tune together if you'd like.

Speaker 8 Oh yes shall I go top or bottom?

Speaker 1 I don't think you can ask that on radio.

Speaker 1 I think the third guest's still here.

Speaker 14 Hi, I'm Deborah Meaden.

Speaker 14 I am very unkindly sometimes referred to as the dragon, TV dragon, but Investor.

Speaker 14 And my question that I wanted to, well, I did ask actually, my first science teacher, because I was a big fan of Doctor Who, hence the Doctor Who theme tune,

Speaker 14 was, will we ever be able to time travel?

Speaker 8 Nice.

Speaker 9 Into the past. No.

Speaker 1 Don't spoil it.

Speaker 1 That might be the question Deborah's going to ask.

Speaker 12 This is our panel.

Speaker 1 Let's start with our first question. So each one of our panel has, as we mentioned, has got a question, and we have a selection of scientists.

Speaker 1 And hopefully, within the audience, we have one that's suitable for each question.

Speaker 1 Of course, we do, there's three people over there, and we know exactly what's going to happen. Anyway, so let's start with your question.

Speaker 8 Can we not do the Doctor Who theme tune really quickly?

Speaker 1 Ten seconds.

Speaker 1 I'll go low. Someone else go hug.

Speaker 1 Now, what would you most like to know about the universe and what lies within it?

Speaker 8 Right. I'm obsessed with trains, with tunnels, with tunnelling.

Speaker 8 The Elizabeth Line, which if you live outside of London and may not have used, is the incredible new East-West service from Reading on the one side to Abbey Wood/slash Shenfield on the other side that basically goes underneath London and it's incredible.

Speaker 8 So it's my spiritual home and I just sit on the Lizzy line and marvel at the incredible engineering and the beauty of it and the aircon and just the everythingness of it.

Speaker 8 With the Elizabeth line, the Lizzy as I call it, sometimes the Lizzo, just for lols.

Speaker 8 But every time I'm on it, I just think, how is this marvellous contraption getting me from A to B without bumping into any other things underground? How was it built? How did they make the tunnels?

Speaker 8 Why does London not fall down? I'm obsessed.

Speaker 1 Well hopefully we've got a scientist who can answer that so let's find out with scientist number one.

Speaker 6 Hi my name's Isabel Komen and I'm the Director of Engineering at Transport for London and I spent seven years of my life working on the building of the Elizabeth Line.

Speaker 1 So let's have your first question then.

Speaker 8 To put this into perspective, Isabel, I moved my entire family to what we knew would be an Elizabeth Line station and I remember saying to my two then small girls, I think they were sort of three and five at the time, I said, Girls, you're going to be seven and nine, and then you're going to be riding this line.

Speaker 8 This is going to be incredible. Anyway, cut to, they were 23 and 21

Speaker 8 and had very much left home, but it doesn't matter.

Speaker 8 It was late, but it was so worth the wait.

Speaker 1 What you're saying is, you haven't got a question.

Speaker 9 I was going to say, can I just butt in and maybe just ask a science question? Yes.

Speaker 9 Which is, what's the first thing you do when someone says, Right, we need a line, needs to go from here to here under a city like London. I was just about to ask that process.

Speaker 6 So you need to know what's underground. So you need to make sure you're not going to hit something first.
And there's all sorts of things underground, especially in a city like London.

Speaker 6 So whether that's the piles for tall buildings, underground rivers, sewers, obviously, other underground lines.

Speaker 6 So, you need to make sure you don't hit anything, but you also want to connect into other key points.

Speaker 6 So, it's important when people are traveling, they can connect into other stations and other transport modes. So, that becomes really important, and you try and balance all of those things together.

Speaker 6 And then, the other thing you need to know is what's the ground condition? So, what's the soil that you're going to be building in? So, there's lots and lots of things you have to think about.

Speaker 8 Wasn't there a really tense moment where where the Elizabeth Line tunnel at Tottenham Court Road had to go between the northern and the central line and there was something like millimetres.

Speaker 6 It was about a metre between the tunnelling.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 1 to be a thousand millimetres.

Speaker 1 A thousand millimeters. It's non-specific about how many millimetres.
But to be

Speaker 1 a thousand of them.

Speaker 6 You're digging a seven metre hole underneath a tube line with

Speaker 6 the trains running up and down.

Speaker 8 And is it true also, Isabel, that Mark Brunel, Isambard Brunel's dad, didn't he start building a tunnel he wanted to build to France, I think, didn't he?

Speaker 8 And isn't part of that tunnel that he originally started now

Speaker 8 one of the tunnels? I can sense from your face, Isabel, that maybe that's not

Speaker 1 correct, isn't it?

Speaker 8 I'll look into that again.

Speaker 9 But how has it changed over the years? Because I suspect the well, the accuracy with which we know the underground has improved somewhat.

Speaker 6 Yeah, so the main tunnel routes that were built for Crossrail and and the Elizabeth Line were were built with earth pressure balance tunnel boring machines.

Speaker 6 So they're a big machine that gets launched and drives underground or it's dropped into a hole and it bores underground.

Speaker 6 And the the technology that's on those machines nowadays is absolutely incredible.

Speaker 6 So there are lots of monitors and sensors and they have basically have a big cutting wheel at the front of them that that spins around and excavates the material ahead.

Speaker 6 And the whole time that you're digging them,

Speaker 6 the teams that are aboard those are like watching for all the information that's coming to them.

Speaker 6 Because, of course, you can't see ahead of yourself, so you're just trying to interpret the ground and the material that comes through and balance the pressure of the earth in front of you as you cut a hole.

Speaker 6 They have a shield that presses behind it that creates pressure to hold it all up so that you don't get the ground ahead of it falling in, and obviously, the buildings and the railways and everything else that's going on in London falling into the hole as you dig it.

Speaker 14 Being very practical, what happens to all the dig out?

Speaker 1 Oh, that's amazing.

Speaker 6 There's millions of tons of material excavated, and actually, for the Elizabeth Line, I think over 90% of it got transported by railway and barge down the River Thames, and it built a bird sanctuary actually there called Wallasey Island.

Speaker 14 And it was clean enough to do that?

Speaker 6 Yes,

Speaker 6 because you're digging through ancient, ancient ground. So the London Clay, which is where most of the excavation came from, is completely inert material.

Speaker 6 So absolutely perfect for building a bird sanctuary.

Speaker 8 It's so cool. I've got a bit of beef with the Elizabeth Line.
Just a little bit, that's allowed.

Speaker 8 So in my career, I have done... quite a few voiceovers, Isabel.

Speaker 14 Are you doing your voiceover voiceovers?

Speaker 15 I am so doing my voice.

Speaker 8 Anyway, I said to my voiceover agent, Susan, I said, God, do you know what? I would retire if I could be the voice of the Elizabeth line.

Speaker 8 You know, the voice that goes, and the next train to Shenfield will be two minutes from platform four. You see how good that would have been.

Speaker 14 See?

Speaker 8 Thank you.

Speaker 8 Anyway, so I said to Susan, look, any chance you get me in, can I do an audition? Never heard a word, Isabel.

Speaker 1 Not a word. I think it should be me, because I've got quite an aggravating nasal voice.
and I think they should use my voice

Speaker 1 to be like, your train is so late.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, it is so late. And I'd love to tell you why, but full disclosure, someone's taking a dump in the carriage.

Speaker 9 So once you've built the line, so what are the challenges in running the trains?

Speaker 9 You mentioned that they're not on time, it's difficult. How many trains are going through there per hour? How close do they get to each other? How do you manage that?

Speaker 6 So Elizabeth Line runs 24 trains an hour. They have to travel through three signalling systems.

Speaker 6 So, the signaling is the thing that controls and protects the train from crashing into each other, but also it makes sure that they run to time.

Speaker 6 So, the technology and software inside has to be able to tell the train has to know where it is, so it has to know which kind of signaling is being telling it what to do, and that has to

Speaker 6 change between the systems and

Speaker 8 they have to sort of talk to each other.

Speaker 8 The beautiful when you get all three is going out of Ealing Broadway, which is mainline, into, I'm going to say, suburban Paddington, which is kind of the midway signaling system, and then into the tunnel, which is the fully underground one.

Speaker 8 If I happen to be on that part of the line, I do a little Tim Henman when he scores a point like a yes to myself.

Speaker 9 How do you know that?

Speaker 8 I like to look on websites, Brian.

Speaker 1 It's quite funny to hear the studio audience for this show laugh at something as if to go,

Speaker 1 that's too geeky for me.

Speaker 1 But I presume that when the digging actually begins, there will still be moments of surprise. What cannot be detected from above-ground surveying?

Speaker 6 So, you could have faults in the soil where it changes condition.

Speaker 6 And basically, what you end up having is you have geologists who are experts who watch the material coming that gets activated coming back out through the front of the face of the tunnel.

Speaker 6 And the sensors around you are sensing pressure, they're sensing changes.

Speaker 6 The machines are designed to cope with a lot of different situations.

Speaker 1 Yes, Nish, do you have a question you wanted to ask?

Speaker 1 Yes. I'm now embarrassed because my question was going to be: and what is the situation vis-a-vis buried treasure?

Speaker 6 It's a good question because actually.

Speaker 1 Well done, Nish. And if you find buried treasure, who gets to keep it? Is it the individual who finds it, or does it get pumped back into the TFL system?

Speaker 6 So, where the tunnels go, you're not going to find much buried treasure.

Speaker 6 But where the stations were built, so particularly at Liverpool Street, they actually excavated through the Bethlehem Hospital graveyard, which was between the mid-16th century and the mid-18th century.

Speaker 6 And they had to exhume over 3,000 bodies from that graveyard. So, they're national artefacts, they get reburied, and any treasure that might be archaeological treasure is kept and preserved.

Speaker 6 And actually,

Speaker 6 you know, many, many things that have been found out about the population of London in that time through the various things that were excavated out.

Speaker 8 There was a really good exhibition, I don't know if it's still on, of all the artefacts. That was so great.
And there was like a water bison or something found in the Acton area.

Speaker 8 Horns from like a pre-Jurassic water bison.

Speaker 1 I've been to Acton. That's one of the least scary things.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you so much.

Speaker 9 Thank you very much. Isabel Conner.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 9 I've got so many questions.

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Speaker 1 Now, Deborah, you are the next question.

Speaker 14 Yeah, so this is one that my vet and I disagree over.

Speaker 14 And the question is, do animals grieve?

Speaker 1 So what does your vet think then?

Speaker 14 Well, he thinks it's unlikely that they grieve, but I've got a lot of animals. I've had a lot of animals.

Speaker 14 They don't all respond the same way but when we've had to put one down definitely the animals have changed their behaviour so I wonder whether or not that is grief or what that would be and you know their emotions around all of that really well let's find out now meet our next scientist

Speaker 13 Hello, my name is Dr. Liz Paul.
I'm from the University of Bristol and I'm a comparative psychologist. That means I study humans, but I study all sorts of animals as as well.

Speaker 13 And I'm interested in emotion and how it evolved and how we can define it in animals and how we can study it in animals.

Speaker 1 So what's your initial reaction then to Deborah's question?

Speaker 13 I think there's a a little cluster of thoughts.

Speaker 13 One of them would be that maybe your vet is being careful not to over anthropomorphize, you know, to sort of not slip into the trap of assuming that all animals are sort of just like mini uses, you know, furry people.

Speaker 13 I have the thought that actually,

Speaker 13 as scientists, we're interested in answering that question experimentally, but also understanding theoretically what emotion is, what grieving might be, what kind of factors are involved with that.

Speaker 13 Then, finally, the main thought that I have is that we have to sort of point out or say that emotion is a multifaceted phenomenon, so that feeling emotion is only one part of it, and that we also do emotion in terms of our behaviour, and we do emotion in terms of our physiology, and we also change our cognition or our information processing when we're doing emotion.

Speaker 13 So, maybe we can't always answer the question of do they feel, but we can perhaps answer the question of is their physiology or the behaviour changing.

Speaker 14 And I guess also, not all animals are the same. So,

Speaker 14 is there a difference in groups of animals?

Speaker 13 Yes, definitely, yes. So, I guess what you're thinking about tends to be: you know, most of us are experiencing horses, cats, dogs, sheep, and geese.

Speaker 14 Companions and dogs.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 13 most companion animals are mammals. And so we're going to get a lot closer to grief in the mammals, or human-like grief, because we are mammals as well.
Geese, yeah, gonna be a bit more tricky.

Speaker 13 So, in the wild, there are a lot of anecdotal stories reported about chimpanzees. There was a very well reported, very widely reported story about an orcca carrying its dead baby.

Speaker 13 There's also been observations of elephants,

Speaker 13 not just the mother, but other members of the group coming and having a look at a young elephant that's died and spending a lot of time hanging around, kind of you know, touching it and walking around and things.

Speaker 13 So, there's a lot of these kind of, on the whole, larger, bigger-brained mammals doing these sorts of perhaps a bit bit more sadness-like responses.

Speaker 13 And that's also been observed by owners in more systematic studies where sort of owners are asked to report how their dog or their cat has responded to the death of another dog or cat in the household.

Speaker 13 And again, there seem to be more, not always sadness responses, but some kind of behavioural change and potentially some sort of physiological change, so like a stress response.

Speaker 13 But I guess the question is: yeah, are they really feeling a sadness? And I think the answer is, well, I think mammals at least we have evidence that they can experience what they can do.

Speaker 13 Let's say behaviorally, physiologically do loss in some way. They recognize that they had a good thing and it's now gone.
Specifically, grief, you have to be a social animal to recognize that loss.

Speaker 13 But whether grief is somehow special and different from any other loss, like your family going on holiday for a fortnight, you know, and you not knowing whether they're coming back or not, I doubt, because I suspect that that conception of death as a complete end and they're never coming back is something even us humans find it difficult to grasp.

Speaker 14 And I guess that the question would be, I mean, in evolutionary terms, everything we feel has a benefit to us, doesn't it? We feel fear, it keeps us alive, we run away.

Speaker 14 What would be the purpose of grief?

Speaker 13 So if I come back to sort of maybe focusing on the purpose of loss in general, if that's where grief comes from, then the thing that I find interesting as a scientist studying that whole extension, that sort of evolution of all of the amazing complexity that we have as humans in our emotions, but all the sort of seeds of that, the roots of that in our evolutionary history, then I think we can say that loss might have an important adaptive function, particularly in detecting not just the value of things, whether something's good or bad, but detecting the relative value of things.

Speaker 13 So if you give them a very nice food, they know that that's high value. If something bad happens to them, they know that's low value or it's a negative value.

Speaker 13 But a lot of, particularly again, mammals, some birds probably as well, and we haven't studied all animals, can recognize and respond apparently emotionally to when they had a good thing going for them and then it kind of cut back and it wasn't as good anymore.

Speaker 13 So they're learning, it gives them the capacity to learn about the world changing, and that's a very important piece of information.

Speaker 1 What about kind of what you might call in species grief, I suppose, which is you think, and I'm sure you may have seen this, Deborah, and Nish and everyone else, which is, I remember when my dad died and his dog, it was very much out of sorts and a level of confusion, and it didn't have the same kind of vim and verve.

Speaker 1 So, what do we know about that?

Speaker 13 Well, that has been studied, yeah.

Speaker 13 And it's mostly been studied at the moment, as I say, with owner reports, rather than somebody sitting in your house when somebody's just died, you know, observing what your dog did, because that would be a little bit ethically proposed.

Speaker 1 What a weird job, isn't it?

Speaker 13 It would be a weird job.

Speaker 1 Like, knock on the door. Did he have a dog? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 13 Can I come and sit in your house and watch your dog while you're organising the funeral? Yeah.

Speaker 13 So, I think, yeah, dogs are very, very social animals. They've been domesticated for over 40,000 years.

Speaker 13 They've learned to live with humans. They've changed genetically to live with humans.

Speaker 13 So they're just as attached, I would say, to their humans as they would be to another dog in the same way that wolves would have been attached to other wolf pack members.

Speaker 13 So I think it's not surprising that if you've got an animal like a dog that's a highly social animal, that when it understands that somebody who has always been there in its life is no longer there, of course, as I say, they may not understand the finality of death necessarily, but they are definitely going to change their behaviour.

Speaker 13 Having said that, it's not all dogs, and this is what Deborah said as well. You know, it does depend on the nature of the relationship.

Speaker 1 So more arrogant dogs or narcissistic dogs. You mean it depends on like the like Hitler's dog was like, thank God.

Speaker 14 Do you think they recognise death?

Speaker 14 I'm just thinking of one of my horses put down, the other two horses went over, pawed, sniffed, you know, poked around a bit, and then just wandered off and carried on eating grass.

Speaker 14 What was that?

Speaker 13 Yeah, so I think it's something really surprising.

Speaker 13 This is called expectancy violation, I suppose, in animal behaviour. So that would be, they would normally expect it to get up again.

Speaker 13 It tallies very closely with the reports that people have done of, as I say, of wild animals and elephants and giraffes and things like that, you know, responding, going over to the body.

Speaker 13 Interestingly, the primates do something, as I say, the orca and dolphins do this infant carrying, particularly with infants, as though they're trying to revive it in some way, which I think the elephants and the giraffes and these larger animals, you can't pick them up, you know, maybe they're just inspecting it and they may hang around for a while, but they leave.

Speaker 13 Whereas, quite shockingly, in a way, some of the chimpanzees have been videoed, you know, carrying really quite rotten babies around with them, you know, for weeks and if not months.

Speaker 8 When Her Majesty the Queen died, I swear, no, I swear.

Speaker 1 Oh my god, if it could say, Prince Charles went over and he sniffed her a little bit

Speaker 1 and then he just walked away.

Speaker 1 welcome to the final episode

Speaker 1 if there's anyone in from the daily mail i did not think that was funny at all

Speaker 1 say he said it

Speaker 8 no seriously our dog juno from bulgaria inconsolable

Speaker 8 She was really sad. I mean, there was a sadness that hung over the house.
Juno, absolutely, she sensed something in the

Speaker 13 air. So, people have looked at empathy in animals and whether they can empathize with their human owners, but also whether they empathise with other animals.

Speaker 13 And again, they don't necessarily do a fully-fledged, you know, kind of highly cognitive

Speaker 13 human-type empathising, but they do seem to resonate, you know, get some kind of

Speaker 13 stuff.

Speaker 8 Smell it, they smell it.

Speaker 13 Nobody's ever ever shown that, but you never know, you never know.

Speaker 13 But they could well be picking up on emotional cues from the owners.

Speaker 9 I have unbounded admiration for the way you saved that.

Speaker 1 That was just

Speaker 1 magnificent. Deborah, having heard that, where does that leave you now?

Speaker 14 I'm not sure it's settled yet, is it? But from my observations, I come back to something actually you talked about. I do see behavioural change, but some of them, and I try not to anthropomorphize,

Speaker 1 I try, thank you, come on,

Speaker 1 you got it.

Speaker 14 I try not to, but

Speaker 14 I do sense loss. I spend a lot of time with my animals, and I do sense actually from the horses, you know, not all of them, but very close companions.
When one is lost, the other is lost for a while.

Speaker 14 So,

Speaker 14 I feel it's unsettled.

Speaker 1 So, I think that's not sorted anything, but thank you very much.

Speaker 1 I think you tried very hard and will be used in media training programs in the future.

Speaker 1 Thank you to Dr. Liz Paul there.

Speaker 1 Right, so we've gone from the Elizabeth line to death. Nish, where will you take us now? Was Hitler's dog evil?

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 my question is, now I will say, I did submit this question in advance, as requested, and of my original wording, one of the words has been changed. See if you can see which word it was.

Speaker 1 In regards to climate change, are we screwed?

Speaker 1 Now we have our final scientist. Please take to the stage.

Speaker 12 Good evening. I'm Ed Hawkins.
I'm a professor of climate science at the University of Reading.

Speaker 1 And what's your initial reaction there to Nisha's, are we screwed?

Speaker 12 We're not screwed yet.

Speaker 12 It's often talked about as being a problem for our children or our grandchildren, but what we're increasingly realising is that we're feeling the consequences now, today, and the consequences are only going to get worse as our planet continues to warm.

Speaker 1 Do scientists really think, oh, there is a point of no return here?

Speaker 1 I think one of the problems is that there are people now that are increasingly thinking, well, if we've gone beyond the point of no return, then there's almost a kind of despair and a sort of nihilism setting in, especially with, I think, younger people.

Speaker 1 Is that something that is a scientific term, tipping points, points of no return?

Speaker 12 We often hear about the term tipping points, you're right. And

Speaker 12 they exist, we believe, in the system.

Speaker 12 We might imagine, we often talk about the change in the circulation in the Atlantic Ocean and how we might have less heat transported northwards by the ocean currents, which might actually cool our climate.

Speaker 12 And that might be caused by the continuing warming of our planet, you know, slightly paradoxically. So we think these events have happened in the past.

Speaker 12 We don't know when they might occur in the future. They're plausible, but we think they're unlikely in the very near future.

Speaker 9 And that would be cool our climate. You mean in the UK? It would.
So locally.

Speaker 12 It would. So we warm the planet.
What happens is that we are melting greenland.

Speaker 12 For example, we're melting greenland at a rate of three Olympic sized swimming pools every second. And that water is entering the ocean.

Speaker 12 It's causing sea levels to rise, but it's also changing the properties of the water in the North Atlantic, and that might disrupt the ocean circulation.

Speaker 12 The reason we have in the UK a relatively warm climate is because of that circulation, and if it was disrupted, that yes, could cool our climate in the UK and North West Europe.

Speaker 1 Oh man.

Speaker 1 Just trying to work out in terms of the pooping my pantsometer.

Speaker 1 That won't help, that'll actually contribute even more to the warming. We don't want that.

Speaker 1 Are we we at? I don't know how to properly say this. Are we at skid mark or full turf?

Speaker 12 You know, I think what we need to focus on is that we, first of all, we have the solutions, right? So we have enough to worry about, about changing heat waves becoming hotter and more intense,

Speaker 12 about our rainfall becoming more intense and causing more floods, and our droughts becoming more severe. Those are things that we know are going to happen.

Speaker 12 We should worry about those and do something about it. The tipping points are there, they're a possibility, but they're very uncertain.
But they don't really affect what we need to do about it.

Speaker 12 We need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions if we are to stop the warming continuing further.

Speaker 12 And that's what we need to focus on as our target to do, to stabilise global temperatures by reaching net zero emissions.

Speaker 9 Because you know, the Paris climate summit a few years ago now, there's a one and a half degree global average temperature target rise over pre-industrial levels. Wasn't last year

Speaker 9 exceeded that globally on the average?

Speaker 12 So, yes, last year was above 1.5 degrees. That doesn't mean that the Paris Agreement has been breached yet.

Speaker 12 It's a strong indication that we're going to, and I think we will breach that limit in the near future.

Speaker 12 But I think we also need to emphasise that the impacts of climate change, they're not a cliff edge where we go over a level and suddenly everything comes disastrous.

Speaker 12 We are gradually feeling the consequences, and they're getting worse and worse. And every bit of warming matters.
And so we need to ensure that if we miss 1.5 as the target, our next target is 1.6.

Speaker 12 And if we miss that, 1.7.

Speaker 1 The thing that I'm concerned about is: is there a point at which that damage becomes irreversible, that we can no longer claw back habitable life on this planet?

Speaker 12 I mean, I think that's a very long way off if that were to happen. I mean, I think we will probably find certain parts of the planet which will become extremely difficult to live in.

Speaker 1 Like there's Pacific Islands that are just underwater now.

Speaker 12 So, you know, sea level rise is a long-term problem, for example.

Speaker 12 You know, we are going to see more than a metre of sea level rise, whatever we do with our emissions over the next couple of hundred years.

Speaker 12 And so, that is a long-term problem we're going to have to deal with. We're going to have to adapt to that.

Speaker 12 The worst case scenario is that we might see several meters, you know, and how do we plan for London with several meters of sea level rise?

Speaker 12 Of course, we are lucky in that we have money to tackle that problem, and those in more vulnerable parts of the world do not.

Speaker 1 I sometimes think that one of the problems with the way that it's phrased, every time we hear 1.5 degrees, I think in most people's minds they go, Yeah, but you know, there was that summary in 1976.

Speaker 1 So it feels to people like, it still feels to me as if the message about the fragility of life and the rarity of life and the fact that you do need very specific measurements to go and thus life.

Speaker 1 But I think when people hear 1.5 degrees, they go, but

Speaker 1 whatever, you know, it's no different.

Speaker 12 I agree that the one degree, two degrees isn't necessarily always very helpful for telling those stories, for getting across the severity of the consequences.

Speaker 12 You know, seeing several meters of sea level rise, or seeing these much worse heat waves,

Speaker 12 or seeing much more rain come in these downpours that we're seeing across Europe and across the world, we are really feeling that one or one and a half degrees, and we've only had one or one and a half degrees.

Speaker 12 We might have three or four degrees, and if we get to that level, things are going to feel really difficult.

Speaker 1 Sometimes when I try and conceptualise it, it just becomes overwhelming. You go, I've got no idea how to wrap my mind around this.

Speaker 1 But there are solutions out there, and what are ways that we can can get our emissions down?

Speaker 12 So, the vast majority of our emissions come from burning fossil fuels and deforesting large areas of the planet.

Speaker 12 And so, if we are to tackle this, we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, which means we need to electrify most things that we would normally use fossil fuels for and generate that electricity through renewable means.

Speaker 8 The Elizabeth line is electrified.

Speaker 1 But by the sounds of things, the trains are going to have have to be able to turn into bugs.

Speaker 12 But you know, at the same time, there are certain things that we do as a global society which it's going to be extremely difficult or impossible to remove our emissions from.

Speaker 12 And so, actually, we will also need ways of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and burying it back underground from where it came.

Speaker 1 And it's carbon capture. Is that what that means?

Speaker 12 So it's often called direct air capture or direct ocean capture. There's various different methods that we might think about to do that.

Speaker 12 But we will need some of that technology to counteract the emissions that we can't avoid.

Speaker 8 That sounds positive.

Speaker 8 But it does. I didn't even know about that.
That sounds bloody great.

Speaker 12 It hasn't been demonstrated to work at scale yet.

Speaker 8 But it's in the works. It's in the works.

Speaker 1 But that's the issue whenever, because

Speaker 1 carbon capture is now a big political buzzword.

Speaker 1 But there is an issue in that the scale that politicians are suggesting it can achieve is not scientifically possible right now, right?

Speaker 12 Plan A, we need to reduce our emissions as much as possible. There will be some left over that we can't reduce, and so we need other ways of tackling those.

Speaker 14 What about the oceans? Don't they have a massive part to play?

Speaker 12 The oceans play a massive part. The oceans take up 90% of the excess heat that our greenhouse gas emissions are causing.
And it warms up the ocean.

Speaker 12 And as water gets warmer, it expands, which is one of the big reasons we have sea level rise.

Speaker 12 So the oceans are playing a role in that, but they are soaking up a lot of the heat that we are creating through our emissions. That means that the life in the the ocean also faces consequences.

Speaker 12 We're already seeing coral reefs around the world suffer from the hotter temperatures. They bleach and then they die.
And these are the nurseries for fish.

Speaker 12 And there are billions of people around the world who rely on marine sources for their protein source. And so, yes, what we're doing to the ocean is a huge consequence.

Speaker 9 How much of the problem

Speaker 9 is purely scientific in the sense of understanding the climate system and understanding what the solutions might be, and how much of it is behavioural and/or political?

Speaker 12 We know enough about the science to know what we need to do. You know, we've known the basics of the science for a very long time indeed.

Speaker 12 You know,

Speaker 12 this is the 201st episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Speaker 12 It happens to be 201 years since the famous French mathematician Joseph Fourier first suggested that the atmosphere must behave as if it was a greenhouse.

Speaker 1 And that's why we say greenhouse gas.

Speaker 11 Yep. Oh, wow.

Speaker 12 He wanted to know what is the the temperature of the planet. And he did some calculations.

Speaker 12 You know, he knew roughly how much energy was coming from the sun and how much got reflected to try and estimate the planet's temperature.

Speaker 12 And he realized that if he did that, the planet should be a ball of ice.

Speaker 12 Because he had neglected the fact that the atmosphere absorbs infrared radiation emitted from the surface and is that is absorbed by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as a blanket.

Speaker 12 He didn't know what it was in the atmosphere that was doing that, but he recognized that it must be like that.

Speaker 12 And it wasn't until later that we understood that carbon dioxide was the main gas that was doing that. But yes, we've known that basics for 201 years.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Can it be reversed by individuals changing their behaviour? Or is it about industrial response? Or is it all of those things?

Speaker 12 It's all of those things.

Speaker 12 We need to take individual action. We need companies and industry to take actions as well.

Speaker 12 And we need governments to set the direction to ensure that we're going in the right direction to enable people to make the right choices.

Speaker 12 Because often it's very difficult for people to make the right choices because the infrastructure is not in place to do it.

Speaker 14 Can it be reversed, or are we aiming at stopping it?

Speaker 12 So, the target we hear about is net zero, right? Where we are achieving a balance between the emissions that we produce and what we can manage to draw down from the atmosphere.

Speaker 12 But that's probably not the end of the journey, right?

Speaker 12 If we have the technology that allows us to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, then in theory we might be able to go net negative and actually draw down more than we emit and store that excess underground

Speaker 12 and so potentially cool the planet again if we go too far. But that relies on a lot of technology we don't yet have.

Speaker 1 Ed, thank you very much. Amazing.

Speaker 12 Thank you.

Speaker 12 Wow.

Speaker 1 That was an interesting spiral downwards, wasn't it? It started off, isn't the Jubilee line great? Oh, I wonder how sad my dog is when things die. Oh, well, the world's coming to an end.

Speaker 9 I thought that the ultimate message was optimistic, in that the message was that we know what to do, and we can do it if we take collectively.

Speaker 8 I know, but we've been saying that for years, Brian.

Speaker 1 Yeah, let's have the upbeat audience jokes they've written. You better have worked well now.
We're relying on you.

Speaker 1 I will say, my turd has returned back to home base.

Speaker 1 That's the level of optimism I'm operating on. You can eat your dinner off my underpants right now.

Speaker 1 Whoever does the best joke, that's your prize tonight, my friends.

Speaker 1 So, we asked the audience a question, and the question was, what is the most useful thing you've learned from the monkey cage over the previous 200 episodes? What have you got, Brian?

Speaker 9 No spoilers, please. I'm only up to podcast episode August 2022.

Speaker 1 There is a big twist in January 2023 you were not expecting.

Speaker 1 there's an endless supply of things can only get better jokes and puns to torment Brian with. And that is true Natasha, that is true.

Speaker 14 Right, the answer to what is the most useful thing you've learnt is the name of an 11-sided shape.

Speaker 1 What was that Brian?

Speaker 9 I don't remember. Does anyone in here know what the name of an 11-sided shape is? Undecagon.

Speaker 1 Undecagon, we had one down there from someone as well. That sounds good.
Congratulations, you are going to be eating a fine meal with

Speaker 1 bon appetite.

Speaker 1 I've got one here from Barthy that says, I've learned that Brian Cox is the same age as me in astronomical terms, but light years apart in intelligence.

Speaker 1 And I'll say this to Barthy, you have the small and precise handwriting of someone who has killed and will again.

Speaker 8 I've got one here from Dave Bullbrook

Speaker 8 who says, interesting, yes, but Professor Brian Cox's moisturizing regime remains a secret to science.

Speaker 9 Is there anything about any of the signs we've covered?

Speaker 8 I've got to say, Brian, I'm obsessed with your skin.

Speaker 1 Wow, you know that serial killer thing.

Speaker 9 This is a sensible. Look at this.
Peter has saved the day. This should be knowledge is valuable even when it is not useful.

Speaker 9 And there we end.

Speaker 1 That's all we have time for. So, thank to our panel: Deborah Meaden, Mel Gedroich, and Nish Kumar, and of course, our three wonderful scientists who were

Speaker 1 Liz Paul, Ed Hawkins, and Isabel Coleman.

Speaker 9 Now, next week, we'll be discussing whether we should all just move to Mars. Or, to be more specific, we ask the question: Should we settle in space?

Speaker 1 So, that's going to be very exciting. We're going to be talking about canal holidays in Mars.

Speaker 1 We're going to be seeing some of the sites, the different faces that you can visit on Mars, and hopefully, finding the archaeological kind of remains of the people who came down to Earth to build the pyramids.

Speaker 1 He's learned nothing. It's very important that I learned nothing, it's what keeps the show fresh.
Anyway,

Speaker 1 thank you so much to everyone. We'll be back for episode 202.
Bye-bye.

Speaker 14 Till now, nice again.

Speaker 20 Why do we do certain things like blush, lie, or laugh? Things we do every day that don't always make a whole lot of sense.

Speaker 8 You're 330 times more likely to laugh if there's somebody else with you than if you're on your own.

Speaker 20 I'm a paleoanthropologist, and with some expert guests, I'll be revealing why we've evolved to do the things we do, like hanging out with dogs and gossiping.

Speaker 15 Nothing is a better bonder of a group of people than one collective enemy.

Speaker 21 From BBC Radio 4, the new series of Why Do We Do That with me Ella Al Shamahi. Available now on BBC Sounds.

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