Reading Ahead: Episode 1: Climate Change
In the middle of one of this summer's heatwaves, unable to sleep, I woke at four in the morning to find birdsong pouring in through the open window — starting almost exactly on the hour and fading again half an hour later. It struck me as extraordinary, partly because it was beautiful, and partly because I realised I almost never hear it. Most of us are asleep for the one part of the day when nature is at its loudest and most alive. It made me wonder whether those were birds that have always been here, or if there are new voices in the dawn chorus due to our shifting climate.
More than any other challenge, climate change is the one that will most drastically define the century ahead. So, in our first episode of Reading Ahead, I wanted to ask: how do we reconnect with the natural world closely enough to understand what's changing in it, and act accordingly?
To answer that question, I spoke to two people who spend most of their days thinking and talking about climate change. Andrew Charlton-Perez, Professor of Meteorology here at Reading, and Laura Tobin, ITV's broadcast meteorologist and a Reading alumna.
The University of Reading has been a leading voice in climate science for over a hundred years, so in some ways this episode is where our centenary story and our next hundred years properly meet.
What struck me most, talking to Andrew and Laura, is how much of the climate challenge isn't actually a knowledge problem. We know what's happening. Andrew and his colleagues have known the basic physics for over a hundred years. The harder problem is the one in between what the science tells us and what society is willing to do about it. That's precisely the gap I think universities exist to close: not just producing the research, but working out how to carry it into policy, into business, into the choices ordinary people make.
Laura put something to me that I haven't stopped thinking about since. Her message, distilled from years of trying to help audiences act rather than just despair, is this: no one can do everything, but everyone can do something. Not every household can install solar panels or an air source heat pump overnight. But almost everyone can make one small change — one meat-free day, one refill instead of a replacement, one letter to a local politician — and those small things, multiplied across millions of people, are not small at all.
If this podcast episode leaves you with one thing, I hope it's that climate change isn't a problem for scientists to solve on their own, or for politicians to solve on their own. It's a problem we'll only solve together.
And that, in the end, is what stays with me from that birdsong at four in the morning. The choices we make now — as individuals, as institutions, as a University turning a hundred years old this year — will decide whether the next generation gets to wake up to it too.
You can listen to Reading Ahead on your favourite podcast platform, or watch the full conversation on YouTube. And if this episode makes you want to dig further into the University's climate work, our Planet Partners pages are a good place to start.