# data[].attributes.body
Check out our key concepts here, which will help you to apply a critical thinking lens to this topic, and articulate your ideas about it. These concepts are highlighted.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Vox podcast and article, looking at why the ‘much ridiculed’ Gaia hypothesis, which claims that the earth is a living entity, should be taken seriously. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Vox podcast and article, looking at why the ‘much ridiculed’ Gaia hypothesis, which claims that the earth is a living entity, should be taken seriously. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is the Gaia hypothesis, and why was it mocked by many members of the mainstream scientific community? What are Ferris Jabr’s four arguments for the Earth being ‘alive’? How widely accepted are they? How does seeing the Earth as a living organism impact on the moral urgency of the climate crisis? To wrap up: “I think open-mindedness is fundamental to any scientific thinking or scientific process. And we have to be open to the idea that a century from now, or even sooner, all of this will be wrong.” How does the Gaia hypothesis illustrate this approach to knowledge?

KEY TERMS Hypothesis, Fringe, Mainstream, Open-mindedness, Moral urgency

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is the Earth itself a giant living creature?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An old, much-ridiculed hypothesis said yes. It’s time to take it seriously.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Forbes article, demonstrating how the labelling of a phenomenon (climate change) as an ‘emergency’ changes the way we perceive that phenomenon.

# data[].attributes.subject
A Forbes article, demonstrating how the labelling of a phenomenon (climate change) as an ‘emergency’ changes the way we perceive that phenomenon.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE Whilst few experts doubt the link between human activity and climate change, persuading people who are not familiar with the scientific data (or are not persuaded by it) is another matter. How has language (specifically, the word ‘emergency’) helped to change perceptions of this issue? Thinking more widely, what is the role of language in helping to communicate scientific understanding? What are the pros and cons of using words and phrases that are emotive?

KEY TERMS Political language

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What do places like Shropshire (United Kingdom), Hawkes Bay (New Zealand), Sydney (Australia), New York (USA), and Krakow (Poland) have in common?

They are just some of the (and counting) cities, councils and jurisdictions worldwide to have declared a climate emergency. With record temperatures gripping Europe, widespread in South America, and ever-decreasing ice coverage in Greenland, the effects of climate change are being felt globally. As some nations drag their feet on enacting environmental policies or are slowed down by , some cities worldwide are taking matters in their own hands.
See also: One Small Step Renewable Energy Provides Growing Source Of Skilled Jobs For Africa And Asia
By declaring a climate emergency, cities are adopting more powers to help curb the effects of climate change . In New York, the city council has set new carbon reduction for its major buildings, Sydney have added climate considerations in any new policy or infrastructure decisions, while Shropshire Council, a rural district in the English Midlands, has to being carbon-neutral by 2030. In each case, these local governments have also used their declarations as a means to exert pressure on national decision-makers. There is no single definition of a climate emergency declaration, but many see it as a drive for carbon neutrality and a mandate for further political action.

France has declared #ClimateEmergency. This gained near zero attention..
Action surely matters more than words and so far the words have meant nothing. But how can we hold politicians accountable to this if no one even knows an emergency has been declared? https://t.co/YLEQmIv5zC

- Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) July 3, 2019

See also: Mini-Grids Are Ready To Change The World (Again) Deal Or No Deal
Bristol councilor Carla Denyer, who helped her city pass one of the United Kingdom's first local climate emergency declarations in November 2018 : "We are acknowledging we are in an emergency situation. The national government needs to declare an emergency and put resources in place to enable councils to help reduce carbon emissions . It's the first step to radical action." Six months after Bristol made its initial declaration, the United Kingdom became the first country to a climate emergency and pledged to dedicate more resources towards mitigating climate change.
See also: New Zealand Ditches GDP For Happiness And Wellbeing
In many cases, smaller political structures and more power over local policy have enabled cities to make more ambitious goals for themselves than national governments. The town of Chico in California declared a climate emergency after witnessing the most destructive wildfire in state history. Chico has pledged to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2030 and intends to adopt many of the resolutions outlined in the Green New Deal. Rocked by a heatwave that sent temperatures soaring to 47 degrees, Paris is the major city to declare a climate emergency. With emission reduction projects already in place in the French capital, the city council has expanded its environmental plans by announcing it will open a " climate academy " geared to educating the public about the risks of climate change.
See also: 16-Year-Old Activist Demands EU Parliament Act On Climate Change As Quickly As Notre-Dame
Despite a vast array of pledges and policy changes, many declarations have been made in a more symbolic way. Pope Francis recently a worldwide climate emergency and urged nations to do more to tackle the issue head-on. Meanwhile, the declaration made in Krakow was led by local environmental groups with the support of councilor members and was made in a bid to apply on Poland's conservative government. Progressive lawmakers believe the government should increase budget allocations towards fighting climate change, while the ruling party advocate private businesses finding their own, for-profit solutions.

While hundreds of cities and regions are declaring climate emergencies and pledging various levels of commitments, who will be monitoring their progress? Answer: the citizens. With environmental watchdogs such as Greenpeace and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( ) continually monitoring government policies, and demonstrations worldwide by movements such as Extinction Rebellion demanding more , the stage is set for more accountability from decision-makers.

A large proportion of declarations are made as a result of public pressure, with citizens intent of seeing action done to reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change. These declarations are part of a much larger movement that has been spurred by a younger generation that feels by the lack of action taken by governments worldwide. Climate change has been listed as one of the major by younger generations, and they are determined to ensure that their is not compromised by short-term decision-making. From 16-year-old Greta Thunberg's at the United Nations to mass mobilizations in capital cities around the globe, the threat of a climate crisis has pushed most governments towards making stronger environmental pledges.

The 822 jurisdictions who have declared a climate emergency thus far contain over 136 million people and those numbers are expected to rise as governments begin to recognize the real threat posed by climate change. An IPCC report dated from last year stressed that the world may only have until 2030 to climate change before it reaches a more dangerous level. With more opportunities behind a transition towards a low-carbon than ever before and time running out to implement it, cities declaring a climate emergency are helping to raise awareness and drive the changes needed to safeguard the planet. However, these declarations mean nothing without real, concrete action to support them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Climate Emergency Declarations: How Cities Are Leading The Charge

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What do places like Shropshire (United Kingdom), Hawkes Bay (New Zealand), Sydney (Australia), New York (USA), and Krakow (Poland) have in common? They are just some of the (and counting) cities, councils and jurisdictions worldwide to have declared a climate emergency.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Vox article, exploring how ‘mud libraries’ are the ‘backbone’ of climate science.

# data[].attributes.subject
A Vox article, exploring how ‘mud libraries’ are the ‘backbone’ of climate science.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE What counts as good evidence for a claim?

KEY TERMS Language, Scale, Critical pieces of this puzzle

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mud libraries hold the story of the Earth’s climate past — and foretell its future

# data[].attributes.headline
A BBC article that examines the relationship with cognitive biases, and our ability to tackle challenges such as climate change.

# data[].attributes.subject
A BBC article that examines the relationship with cognitive biases, and our ability to tackle challenges such as climate change.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do our biases help or hinder our navigation of the world?

KEY TERMS Cognitive biases

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We know that climate change is happening. We also know that it's the result of increased carbon emissions from human activities like land degradation and the burning of fossil fuels. And we know that it's urgent.

A recent report from international climate experts tells us that we are likely to reach 1.5C of average global warming in as little as 11 years. At that point we can expect "increased risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security and economic growth". These experts also found that temperature rise has already altered human and natural systems in profound ways, resulting in more extreme weather, the melting polar ice caps, sea level rise, droughts, floods and biodiversity loss.

But that information hasn't been enough to change our behaviours on a scale great enough to stop climate change. And a big part of the reason is our own evolution. The same behaviours that once helped us survive are, today, working against us.

It's important to remember one thing, however. It's true that no other species has evolved to create such a large-scale problem - but no other species has evolved with such an extraordinary capacity to solve it, either.

You might also like:
* Ten simple ways to act on climate change
* The perils of 'short-termism': Humanity's greatest threat
* The wrong images to show climate change
Brain biases
We lack the collective will to address climate change because of the way our brains have evolved over the last two million years.

"Humans are very bad at understanding statistical trends and long-term changes," says political psychologist Conor Seyle, director of research at One Earth Future Foundation, a programme incubator that focuses on fostering peace long-term.

"We have evolved to pay attention to immediate threats. We overestimate threats that are less likely but easier to remember, like terrorism, and underestimate more complex threats, like climate change."

In early phases of human existence we faced an onslaught of daily challenges to our survival and ability to reproduce - from predators to natural disasters. Too much information can confuse our brains, leading us to inaction or poor choices that can place us in harm's way.

As a result, our brains evolved to filter information rapidly and focus on what is most immediately essential to our survival and reproduction. We also evolved to remember both threats, so that they could be avoided in the future, and opportunities, so we could easily recall where to find sources of food and shelter.

These biological evolutions ensured our capacity to reproduce and survive by saving our brains time and energy when dealing with vast amounts of information. However, these same functions are less useful in our modern reality and cause errors in rational decision-making, known as cognitive biases. "Cognitive biases that ensured our initial survival make it difficult to address complex, long-term challenges that now threaten our existence, like climate change," says Seyle.

Psychologists have identified more than 150 cognitive biases we all share. Of these, a few are particularly important in explaining why we lack the will to act on climate change.

Hyperbolic discounting. This is our perception that the present is more important than the future. Throughout most of our evolution it was more advantageous to focus on what might kill us or eat us now, not later. This bias now impedes our ability to take action to address more distant-feeling, slower and complex challenges.

Our lack of concern for future generations. Evolutionary theory suggests that we care most about just a few generations of family members: our great-grandparents to great-grandchildren. While we may understand what needs to be done to address climate change, it's hard for us to see how the sacrifices required for generations existing beyond this short time span are worth it.

The bystander effect. We tend to believe that someone else will deal with a crisis. This developed for good reason: if a threatening wild animal is lurking at the edge of our hunter-gatherer group, it's a waste of effort for every single member to spring into action - not to mention could needlessly put more people into danger. In smaller groups, it was usually pretty clearly delineated who would step up for which threats, so this worked. Today, however, this leads us to assume (often wrongly) that our leaders must be doing something about the crisis of climate change. And the larger the group, the stronger this bias becomes.

The sunk-cost fallacy. We are biased towards staying the course even in the face of negative outcomes. The more we've invested time, energy or resources into that course, the more likely we are to stick with it - even if it no longer seems optimal. This helps explain, for example, our continued reliance on fossil fuels as a primary source of energy in the face of decades of evidence that we both can and should transition to clean energy and a carbon neutral future.

These cognitive biases evolved for good reason. But they're now hamstringing our ability to respond to what could be the largest crisis humanity has ever created or had to face.
Evolutionary upside
The good news is that our biological evolution hasn't just hindered us from addressing the challenge of climate change. It's also equipped us with capacities to overcome them.

Take our capacity for mental "time travel". Compared to other animals, we are arguably unique in the degree to which we can recall past events and anticipate future scenarios.

We can imagine and predict multiple, complex outcomes and identify actions needed in the present to achieve desired outcomes in the future. And individually we often prove able to act on these plans. We invest in retirement accounts and buy insurance, for example, as ways to counter our short-term interests over the long-term.

Unfortunately, this capacity to plan to ensure a future outcome breaks down when large-scale collective action is needed - as is the case with climate change. As individuals, we know what we can do about climate change. But addressing the issue also requires collective action on a scale that exceeds our evolutionary capacities. The larger the group, the more challenging it gets. Remember the bystander effect?

But in small groups, it's a different story.

As primates, we evolved to work cooperatively to defend territory and sustainably harvest food and resources for the group, all while ensuring enough genetic diversity to procreate. Anthropological experiments show us that, on average, any one individual can maintain stable relationships with 150 other people - a phenomenon known as "Dunbar's number". Beyond that social relationships begin to break down, undermining an individual's ability to trust and rely on the actions of others to achieve collective long-term goals.

Recognising the power of small groups, Exposure Labs, the film company behind Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral, is using its films to mobilise communities to take local action on climate change. For example, in South Carolina, a US state rife with leaders who deny climate change, Exposure Labs shows a film to get a conversation started, inviting people from various interest groups - like the agricultural, fisheries, and tourism industries - to talk about how climate change affects them personally. They then work these small groups to identify practical actions that can be taken immediately at the local level to make an impact - something that helps generate the political pressure necessary to compel lawmakers to pass relevant local or state-wide legislation. When local communities shape the narrative around individual interests, people are less likely to succumb to the bystander effect and more likely to engage.

These approaches use a couple of other psychological strategies, too. First, when small groups are involved in coming up with solutions themselves, they experience the endowment effect: when we own something (even an idea), we tend to value it more. Second, social comparison: we tend to evaluate ourselves by looking at others. If we're surrounded by other people in a group who are taking action on climate change, we're more likely to do the same. This is also the impetus behind programmes like comparing energy consumption from household to household in a community. Research shows that when people compare their energy use with their neighbours' via statements on their energy bills they are more likely to reduce energy consumption.

Of all our cognitive biases, however, the framing effect is one of the strongest affecting our decision-making processes. Humans are more likely to change behaviour when challenges are framed positively, instead of negatively. In other words, how we communicate about climate change influences how we respond. People are more likely to act in relation to a positive frame ("a clean energy future will save X number of lives") versus a negative statement ("we're going to go extinct due to climate change").

"Most people believe that climate change is real, but feel powerless to do something about it in the face of consequences that feel far away from home," says Exposure Labs managing director Samantha Wright. "So to get people to act, we need to make the issue feel direct and personal by focusing the issue locally, pointing both to local impacts and local solutions: like moving one's city to 100% renewable energy."

Similarly, behaviour change must be incentivised at the local level. One nation leading the way has been Costa Rica, which put in place an innovative carbon tax on fuel back in 1997. To emphasise the connection for taxpayers between fuel use and benefits to their own communities, part of the revenue goes to pay farmers and indigenous communities to protect and regrow Costa Rica's tropical forests. Costa Rica's system "now generates $33 million annually for these groups and has helped the country reverse their forest loss while growing and transforming their economy," says Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, Costa Rica's Minister of Environment and Energy. In 2018, 98% of electricity used in the country came from renewable energy sources.

Rodriguez says the country is going even further; they've announced a goal to be carbon neutral by 2050, an effort which will include a bus fleet that is 70% electric by 2035 and cutting the number of cars used in cities in half by 2040. The key has been having a large-scale, organised effort - but one supported and understood by hundreds of smaller groups and communities.

At a larger scale, the Paris Agreement and the EU's 2050 carbon neutrality plan play a similar role, creating a common climate change action framework for countries, cities, towns and the private sector. "The EU's 2050 carbon neutral plan is what's needed at the global level to generate enough momentum, awareness and action, more importantly, it sets an example that can be matched and replicated by others," says Patricia Zurita, CEO of BirdLife International, a global partnership of bird conservation organisations.

Above all, the most helpful trait we've evolved to have is our ability to innovate. In the past, we used this skill to discover fire, invent the wheel or plant the first fields. Today, it may look more like solar panels, wind farms, electric vehicles and carbon pricing. Along with innovation, we've evolved to have the communication and technology to pass these innovations on, allowing a single idea or invention to spread far beyond our own family or town.

From mental time travel to cooperative social behavior to our abilities to innovate, teach and learn, all of these evolutionary consequences always have helped us secure our own survival, and they will continue to do so - albeit in the face of a very different threat than we had in our hunter-gatherer days.

We have evolved to be able to stop human-induced climate change. Now we must act.
Join 900,000+ Future fans by liking us on , or follow us on or . If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We know that climate change is happening. We also know that it's the result of increased carbon emissions from human activities like land degradation and the burning of fossil fuels. And we know that it's urgent. A recent report from international climate experts tells us that we are likely to reach 1.5C of average global warming in as little as 11 years.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Smithsonian article, exploring how two California artists are helping people to ‘personalize their eco grief’ via the creation of neologisms. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Smithsonian article, exploring how two California artists are helping people to ‘personalize their eco grief’ via the creation of neologisms. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, and who is behind it? How does it try to relieve people’s ‘climate distress’? Why do you think it has managed to make such an impact on people around the world? Using their methods, rethink your starter response, and come up with a neologism to summarize your feelings about climate change. Overall, how does language help us to understand and deal with our emotions?

Key terms Lexicon, Word making salon, Neologisms, Climate distress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A bucolic field dotted with plump cows might not seem like a depressing sight, but as I passed by this serene landscape each day to pick up my son from school, that's exactly how I felt. Depressed. Helpless. Mired in melancholy.

But why? They were just cows, after all.

I was worried about them disappearing, though. And by "disappearing," I mean being hauled in livestock trailers to some other pasture far away so developers could have their way with the field. Much of central Texas, where I live, was once farmland. Now I was watching those wide-open spaces get bulldozed and covered in asphalt as opportunistic developers threw up cookie-cutter housing developments and apartment buildings where cedar elm and wildflowers once grew. I loved staring at those cows, but it was also painful, because I knew that one day soon, I'd likely see construction signs pop up in that field, and my pastoral vista would become a parking lot.

These feelings wouldn't leave me. I had no words for what I was experiencing, so I did what any curious human with internet access does in 2022. I started googling. My searches led me to terms likesolastalgia, coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht. It means, in essence, distress caused by a changing environment, or the loss of a comforting place. I then stumbled across Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante's ongoing participatory art project called the Bureau of Linguistical Reality. They weren't just coming up with one word to describe feelings of climate grief-they were creating thousands, in collaboration with people across the globe.

The project started eight years ago, when Bay Area artists Quante and Escott had no words to describe the anxiety they were experiencing over California's drought. "Angry" was too simplistic. "Sad" didn't feel quite right. So they got creative. When they couldn't find the words, they decided to make them up.

"The weight of the drought started to impact our psyches," says Escott, a visual artist working across mediums, always with the goal of conveying the "shape and scope and feeling of climate change." They first met around 2009 when Quante organized and curated a juried art show in San Francisco, and Escott was one of the artists. They reconnected for coffee in 2014, and that conversation centered around art and their own personal feelings about climate change.

When they discovered that they'd both felt despondent during unseasonably warm Northern California days, while everyone else was playing frisbee in the park, they knew that climate anxiety was to blame. It should be chilly and drizzly, not bone dry and hot, they thought. And if they were feeling this way, other people must be searching for words to describe their emotions about weather, wildfires and floods too.

"I remember thinking that someone needed to come up with a lexicon, but I never thought I could be that person," says Quante, a multi-disciplinary artist who has been working on climate change initiatives for decades. In 1997, she lobbied for the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty that set limits on greenhouse gasses. The Bureau started soon after that coffee date, when Escott and Quante invited friends and colleagues over for a "word making salon." Quante says that most of her friends later told her that they "had absolutely no idea what on earth a word making salon was," but they trusted her and wanted to give it a try. That first salon, in January 2015, was so popular that the guests stayed until one o'clock in the morning. After that they held three salons a month, and had to put a cap on participants.

Later in 2015, the artists traveled to France when the Paris Climate Agreement was adopted. They set up a "Mobile Field Office," complete with a desk and office setup. They wore matching jumpsuits, put up banners and signs that read "The Bureau of Linguistical Reality," and engaged with anyone who was curious about what they were doing there. The pop-up experience was the first time they had taken the Bureau outside of Quante's living room. At events and pop-ups, they never solicit or coax anyone to interact with them. The point is for someone to become curious enough to engage on their own. Quante says that a curious but skeptical lawyer who sat down with them in Paris ended up revealing his own anxiety over climate change.

"He broke down and cried," she says. "He looked at some of the words we'd come up with and was moved that someone else was feeling what he was feeling."

By "the words," she means the neologisms, or newly invented terms, that she and Escott help others create to describe their own personal experience of climate grief, eco anxiety, or, as climate psychology educator and author Leslie Davenport prefers to call it, climate distress.

"I use climate distress because it can hit people in different ways at different times," says Davenport, who advises individuals, organizations and corporations on the importance of integrating climate psychology into mainstream life. "Climate anxiety is used the most but it leaves out people feeling angry and frustrated and depressed and overwhelmed. It can take on so many flavors."

Much like Albrecht, who combined the words solace and algos (Greek for pain) to come up with solastalgia, the Bureau of Linguistical Reality merges words from any language, in any configuration.

"We're playful," says Escott.

When I ask Quante and Escott about some of their favorite words of the over 1,000 they've helped create, comes up. Quante describes it as meaning a seed that, due to social trauma, has stayed dormant until it finds itself in a safe environment. Then it takes root. Basically, it means speaking your truth.

Other favorites are shadowtime(acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present), blissonance(when an otherwise blissful experience in nature is disrupted by the feeling that your presence is harming that very place), and-one of my favorites-ennuipocalypse (a doomsday that occurs slowly, instead of all at once).

Coming up with a word to express your climate distress won't end a drought or put out wildfires, but it might, eventually, motivate you to act in some way. The more I talked to Escott and Quante, the more I understood that their project isn't really about the words, it's about giving people a space to talk about the fact that they have nightmares about carbon emissions, or that they cry every time they see a field of cows.

After Hurricane Sandy devastated communities on the East Coast in 2012, the Bureau later set up a Mobile Field Office in the street outside of a subway stop in the Rockaways in Queens. It didn't take long before curious passersby sat down and told their stories.

"The volume of people was off the chain," says Quante. "No one had ever asked them how they were feeling. People of all ages were desperate to tell stories. They were traumatized. That's where we want to see the Bureau go, into public spaces with communities that haven't been given an opportunity to share their grief. We're just here to listen."

In their seven years of operation, they've created words with farmers in California, and a woman in Paris who used Haitian Creole terms to come up with her neologism: SonjeKoukouymõn (a longing for the sound of cicadas and the lights of fireflies). The Bureau has set up shop at festivals in Scotland and events across the U.S., and they've partnered with organizations, like the French Ministry of Culture, Berkeley Art Museum, and Rockaway Community Group, as well as schools like Cornell University and UC Berkeley, where they encourage students to think more deeply about climate change, across every discipline. They've been invited to participate in the upcoming biodiversity conference Festival Agir Pour Le Vivant in France, and are in discussions with several U.S. organizations about 2023 events. A New York City jazz band wrote a song called "The Bureau of Linguistical Reality," and a group in Canada wrote a series of poems inspired by the word quieseed. Anyone can submit words via the Bureau's website, but they say the real power of the project comes from the in-person interaction, the conversation and the space that helps people understand that their feelings are valid.

The words aren't always lovely. Quante says that, especially with younger generations, "anger is a top sentiment."

One participant coined the term gwilt (when you cause plants to wilt because you're trying to conserve water). Another created morbique (the morbid desire to travel to places before they are radically altered by climate change).

Davenport says that she sees this in teenagers that she's worked with as well.

"They have a lot of outrage towards older generations, anger at governments and institutions for not doing things fast enough," Davenport says. Before she went into psychology, Davenport was a dancer, and the arts are integral to who she is. She understands the value in a project like the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, in that it can help humans process their fear or anxiety in healthy ways.

"Our predominant Western society has shut down the creative, the intuitive, the expressive," says Davenport. "I feel like we're operating with sort of a partial brain in general, and the arts help open up and reactivate those capacities."

She says it's important not to pathologize feelings of climate distress, and she doesn't condone "magical thinking," as in believing that someone, someday will swoop in and solve the mess we're in. Acknowledging the feelings, though, through art or action, is important.

"If you're paying attention and you care, you're going to be feeling big feelings," she says.

I'd been paying an awful lot of attention to that field of cows by my house, so I decided to give the Bureau a try, to see if we could dream up a word that might help define my discomfort. Instead of sitting down in person at a Mobile Field Office, I hopped on a Zoom meeting with Escott, having no idea what to expect. I came ready with a few words that reflected my region and the way I was feeling: helpless, tuckered out, yonder and reckon were on the list. And then Escott started asking me questions. It felt, in the best way, like a therapy session entirely devoted to my feelings about climate distress. Nothing I said about the cows was laughed off or dismissed. The list of words got longer as we brainstormed and told stories. At last we hit on one that felt, to me, just right.

Yonderlonging.

It means mourning a wide open space that you fear will soon disappear. It's kind of like my own personal brand of solastalgia. Most importantly, it just feels right. Will it stop the forward march of "progress" and cause all the bulldozers in Texas to stop working, and the developers to abandon their grand plans? Definitely not. Will any one word or art project end climate change as we know it? Sadly, no. But creating words does help. Acknowledging a feeling can make it more manageable.

"If our words are clumsy, we're okay with that," Escott says. "We've gone all over the world, and people tell us they have experienced a feeling but they don't know how to talk about it, and we're like, 'Oh, we have four words for that.' We just want to get as many voices in the conversation as possible."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Two California Artists Can Help Personalize Your Eco-Grief

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A bucolic field dotted with plump cows might not seem like a depressing sight, but as I passed by this serene landscape each day to pick up my son from school, that's exactly how I felt. Depressed. Helpless. Mired in melancholy. But why? They were just cows, after all.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Guardian article, looking at a report that says we should take a far more qualitative approach to measuring the value of nature. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Guardian article, looking at a report that says we should take a far more qualitative approach to measuring the value of nature. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why has a report by 82 leading scientists concluded that the wider benefits of nature have been ignored - and what are the consequences of this? What balance between qualitative and quantitative methods should we use to evaluate the natural world? Why is this an important question for the future of humanity? Overall, how should we draw on different academic and cultural perspectives in order to establish a fuller understanding of the natural world?

Key terms Spiritual, Cultural and emotional values, Qualitative, Experts, Super-quantitative, Good science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Taking into account all the benefits nature provides to humans and redefining what it means to have a "good quality of life" is key to living sustainably on Earth, a four-year assessment by 82 leading scientists has found.

A market-based focus on short-term profits and economic growth means the wider benefits of nature have been ignored, which has led to bad decisions that have reduced people's wellbeing and contributed to climate and nature crises, according to a UN report. To achieve sustainable development, qualitative approaches need to be incorporated into decision making.

This means properly valuing the spiritual, cultural and emotional values that nature brings to humans, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Ipbes). The assessment includes more than 13,000 references, including scientific papers, and indigenous and local sources of information. It was done in collaboration with experts in social science, economics and humanities.

The report builds on the Dasgupta review, which found the planet is being put at "extreme risk" by the failure of economics to take account of the true value of nature. Incorporating diverse worldviews and knowledge systems will be key to leading to a more sustainable future, the report says.

Prof Unai Pascual, from the Basque Centre for Climate Change, who co-chaired the assessment on the diverse values and valuation of nature said: "There has been a dominant way of taking decisions based on things that look more simple, super-quantitative, and more scientific, and we're saying: 'No, that's not good science.' There are a lot of social sciences and humanities, and other knowledge systems, that can also tell us how to do things."

The review highlights four general perspectives that should be taken into account; "living from nature" which refers to its ability to provide us with our needs like food and material goods; "living with nature", which is the right of non-human life to thrive; "living in nature" which refers to people's right to a sense of place and identity, and finally, "living as nature", which treats the world as a spiritual part of being human.

"The type and quality of information that valuation studies can produce largely depends on how, why and by whom valuation is designed and applied," says Prof Mike Christie, of Aberystwyth University's business school. "This influences whose and which values of nature would be recognised in decisions, and how fairly the benefits and burdens of these decisions would be distributed."

There are 50 different methods and approaches of making the value of nature visible in decisions, yet researchers found that the way stakeholders valued nature was only taken into account on 2% of studies. Moving forward there are many tools available to make the values of nature visible and these need to be implemented, authors say. One way of working is using citizen assemblies, which reflect the sociology of a given people and gives them a chance to discuss their values, interests and understandings. These are happening at a national level in a number of countries.

One successful example is how the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organisation has integrated indigenous perspectives in planning, which involved decision-makers participating in ceremonies and "experiencing" the land together. Another was the Indian government's decision not to mine near the Niyamgiri mountain which is sacred for Dongaria Kondh peoples. The intrinsic value of the site for rare species and its cultural and spiritual value to indigenous people was seen as more valuable than the financial gains from mining it.

There are consequences of not taking other values into account, such as environmental leaders being killed because they had claims to land that have been ignored, says Prof Patricia Balvanera, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who co-chaired the assessment. "The evidence shows that if, from the onset, local values are taken into consideration, people will feel part of the project and will be more onboard with whatever was agreed ... This entails redefining 'development' and 'good quality of life' and recognising the multiple ways people relate to each other and to the natural world," she says.

Sign up to First Edition, our free daily newsletter - every weekday morning at 7am BST

The assessment was approved by representatives of 139 countries in German city of Bonn. "The delegates who endorsed this report say this is a game-changer," says Pascual. "They realise we've been going through a way of understanding nature in a too-narrow sense, and that has brought us to this situation where we live in a planet with interconnected crises ... this [report] is one ingredient out of many which will be needed to convince very powerful stakeholders and decision makers to start changing the way they treat nature."

Ipbes, which is the equivalent of the IPCC for biodiversity, was set up to provide governments across the world with scientific advice on how to protect nature. Last week, it released another report that found wild species support half the world's population but their future use is threatened by overexploitation.

It comes ahead of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Cop15 in Montreal in December, which will set the next decade of nature targets, and authors say the findings should provide a valuable contribution to the process. Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of CBD said: "I applaud the work of all Ipbes experts for this and look forward to its active use by all parties and stakeholders to the convention."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Humans need to value nature as well as profits to survive, UN report finds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Focus on market has led to climate crises, with spiritual, cultural and emotional benefits of nature ignored

# data[].attributes.headline
A Science News article, looking at the way indigenous reindeer herders are working with climate scientists to understand Arctic warming.

# data[].attributes.subject
A Science News article, looking at the way indigenous reindeer herders are working with climate scientists to understand Arctic warming.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is the relationship between knowledge and culture?

KEY TERMS Collaborate, Predicting, Call to action, Implications, Paired knowledge, Encoded

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Reindeer herders and scientists collaborate to understand Arctic warming

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Siberian reindeer herders and scientists are working together to figure out how to predict rain-on-snow events that turn tundra into deadly ice.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Sky News video, looking at the relationship between the Kogi people of Colombia and the natural world - and what we can learn from them. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Sky News video, looking at the relationship between the Kogi people of Colombia and the natural world - and what we can learn from them. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE Who are the Kogi people, and why are they in the news? How different are their beliefs about the natural world to those of us belonging to large-scale, industrialized societies? Why does their approach to the environment have less of an impact than ours? Overall, does having a spiritual relationship with the natural world help us to understand and protect it more effectively?

Key terms Advice, Interconnected, Voice, Living entity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A member of Colombia’s indigenous Kogi people tells Sky News about a project to restore part of their original land back to them.

# data[].attributes.headline
This Guardian article explores how indigenous stewardship of land offers a better way to manage carbon emissions. 

# data[].attributes.subject
This Guardian article explores how indigenous stewardship of land offers a better way to manage carbon emissions. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE What are the differences between smaller-scale, indigenous societies, and larger-scale, industrialized society in terms of the way we produce and use our knowledge about the natural world? Can our values ever support the responsible stewardship of the environment?

Key terms Stewardship

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ecosystems will continue to collapse around the world unless humanity listens to the expertise of indigenous communities on how to live alongside nature, a prominent Amazon leader has warned.

Tuntiak Katan of the Ecuadorian Shuar people, who is vice-president of the pan-Amazon organisation representing communities in the river basin, said governments were spending millions of dollars on environmental consultants while largely ignoring the land management skills of the planet's indigenous people that could help combat the climate crisis and biodiversity loss.

Speaking to the Guardian from the Ecuadorian Amazon, Katan, who became the first indigenous representative at a UN climate action summit last year, said environmental "catastrophes" such as the fires that devastated the world's largest rainforest in 2019 would continue unless the contributions and human rights of indigenous people were respected.

Indigenous communities support around 80% of the planet's biodiversity despite accounting for less than one twentieth of the human population, according to the World Bank.

Katan's warning came as a new study revealed that parts of the Amazon rainforest under the stewardship of indigenous peoples sequester carbon better than areas with little protection, leading to less deforestation and degradation.

"We are the defenders of nature, of the life of the forests, of our territories," said Katan, vice-president of Coordinator of the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin ( Coica). "The world is investing lots of money to implement public policy to combat climate change, help conservation and restoration. But these policies are made in offices by technical experts with little or no knowledge of the Earth."

Biodiversity loss was named as the third biggest risk to the world in terms of likelihood and severity this year by the World Economic Forum, ahead of terror attacks, infectious diseases and interstate conflict.

Children from the Huni Kuin tribe on land ravaged by the 2019 Amazon fires. Photograph: David Tesinsky/Mediadrumimages

Despite the concerns expressed by the global elite in Davos, there was no indigenous representation at last week's forum in the Swiss ski resort, according to Katan. He said he would welcome the opportunity to attend next year's forum to outline an indigenous economic model based on maintaining the health of the world's soils, rivers and the forest.

"If the proposals, knowledge and management practices of indigenous people are not listened to, there will be more big catastrophes. The issue of fires in the Amazon will continue, the degradation of forests and water will continue, deforestation will continue," Katan added.

This month, the UN unveiled the draft of a Paris-style agreement on nature calling for a commitment to protect at least 30% of the planet, dramatically reduce pollution and promote the participation and practices of indigenous people.

Katan said: "We are well-coordinated with our brothers and sisters from Indonesia, the Congo, communities in the Arctic and from the Pacific. We've been discussing issues with our brothers and sisters from all parts of the world.

"In Indonesia, for example, they also have a lot of knowledge about how to manage tropical forests. But the same story is being repeated here as in other parts of the world: the lack of recognition of their knowledge and the lack of respect for the human rights of indigenous populations."

Anti-indigenous sentiment is increasing in some parts of the planet. This month activists said they would sue Brazil's far-right president Jair Bolsonaro for his latest racist comments in which he questioned the humanity of indigenous communities.

In one of his weekly Facebook broadcasts, Bolsonaro declared: "Indians are undoubtedly changing ... They are increasingly becoming human beings just like us."

A person holds cardboard crosses that read 'indigenous land' during a protest against budget cuts on public education by President Jair Bolsonaro's government. Photograph: Silvia Izquierdo/AP

The new study from the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, found that between 2003 and 2016, 90% of net emissions came from outside protected lands in the Amazon.

Scientist and lead author Wayne Walker said: "Our work shows that forests under the stewardship of indigenous peoples and local communities continue to have better carbon outcomes than lands lacking protection, meaning that their role is critical and must be strengthened if Amazon basin countries are to succeed in maintaining this globally important resource, while also achieving their commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement."

The findings add weight to the recommendations of a report on land use and the climate crisis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found that areas held or managed by indigenous peoples had much less human impact on the environment.

The report also highlighted the lack of consideration of indigenous views and knowledge in understanding large regions and ecosystems.
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Trust our expertise or face catastrophe, Amazon peoples warn on environment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Indigenous leader urges focus on native knowledge as study shows rainforest areas under tribal stewardship manage carbon better

# data[].attributes.headline
A Conversation article, looking at what the world can learn about conservation and trust from indigenous societies. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Conversation article, looking at what the world can learn about conservation and trust from indigenous societies. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE Focus on ‘TEK’, and what its three elements mean. What does the article say are the key differences between indigenous and industrialized approaches to resource management? What can be learned from it? How should we balance avoiding stereotypical views of indigenous societies as being ‘at one with nature’, with a willingness to learn from them? Overall, how important is it to be willing to learn from other societies and cultures about the world - and what happens if we are not?

Key terms Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), Stereotypes, Framework to understand, Trust, Deference, Respectful, Accountable

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A family in northern Siberia watches - but decides not to hunt - a musk ox that wandered into the area where they live. John Ziker, Author provided

Twenty-five years ago, when I was a young anthropologist working in northern Siberia, the Indigenous hunters, fishers and trappers I lived with would often stop and solemnly offer something to the tundra. It was usually small, such as coins, buttons or unlit matches. But it was considered essential. Before departing on a hunting or fishing trip, I'd be asked if I had some change in my outer coat. If I didn't, someone would get me some so it was handy. We left other gifts, too, such as fat from wild reindeer to be fed to the fire.

I was intrigued. Why do these things? Their answers were usually along the lines of, "We are the children of the tundra," or "we make these sacrifices so that tundra will give us more animals to hunt next year."

These practices are part of what I and other anthropologists call " traditional ecological knowledge." Beliefs and traditions about the natural world are central in many Indigenous cultures around the world, bringing together what industrialized cultures think of as science, medicine, philosophy and religion.

Many academic studies have debated whether Indigenous economies and societies are more oriented than others toward conservation or ecology. Certainly the idealized stereotypes many people hold about Indigenous groups' being "one with nature" are simplistic and potentially damaging to the groups themselves.

However, recent studies have underscored that conservationists can learn a lot from TEK about successful resource management. Some experts argue that traditional knowledge needs a role in global climate planning, because it fosters strategies that are "cost-effective, participatory and sustainable."

Part of TEK's success stems from how it fosters trust. This comes in many different forms: trust between community members, between people and nature, and between generations.

Defining TEK

Looking more closely at the components of TEK, the first, "tradition," is something learned from ancestors. It's handed down.

"Ecological" refers to relationships between living organisms and their environment. It comes from the ancient Greek word for "house," or "dwelling."

Finally, the earliest uses of the term "knowledge" in English refer to acknowledging or owning something, confessing something and sometimes recognizing a person's position or title. These now-obsolete meanings emphasize relationships - an important aspect of knowledge that modern usage often overlooks but that is especially important in the context of tradition and ecology.

Combining these three definitions helps to generate a framework to understand Indigenous TEK: a strategy that encourages deference for ancestral ways of dwelling. It is not necessarily strict "laws" or "doctrine," or simply observation of the environment.

TEK is a way of looking at the world that can help people connect the land they live on, their behavior and the behavior of the people they are connected to. Indigenous land practices are based on generations of careful and insightful observations about the environment and help define and promote "virtuous" behavior in it.

As an American suburbanite living in a remote community in Siberia, I was always learning about what was "proper" or "improper." Numerous times people would tell me that what I or someone else had just done was a "sin" in respect to TEK. When someone's aunt died one year, for example, community members said it happened because their nephew had killed too many wolves the previous winter.

Similarly, after stopping to assess the freshness of some reindeer tracks on the tundra, one hunter told me, "We let these local wild reindeer roam in midwinter so they will return next year and for future generations." Here, TEK spells out the potential environmental impacts of greed - which, in this case, would mean overhunting.

Concepts like these are not isolated to Siberia. Much work has been done examining the parallels among ancestral systems of deference in Siberia, Amazonia, North America and other regions.

Trust and tradition

These examples illustrate how TEK is a set of systems that promote trust through encouraging deference for ancestral ways of dwelling in the world.

Moderation of self-interested behaviors requires such trust. And confidence that the environment will provide - caribou to hunt, say, or ptarmigan birds to trap - depends on the idea that people will treat the environment in a respectful manner.

Previously, I've studied prosociality - behavior that benefits others - in northern Siberian practices of food-sharing, child care and use of hunting lands.

These aspects of life depend on the idea that the "real" owners of the natural resources are ancestors and that they punish and reward the behaviors of the living. Such ideas are encouraged by elders and leaders, who commend virtuous and prosocial behavior while connecting negative outcomes with selfishness.

Trust is an essential component of reciprocity - exchange for mutual benefit - and prosociality. Without trust, it does not make sense to take risks in our dealings with other people. Without trust we cannot cooperate or behave in nonexploitative ways, such as protecting the environment. This is why it is advantageous for societies to monitor and punish noncooperators.

Put another way, minimizing one's resource use today to make tomorrow better requires trust and mechanisms to enforce it. This is also true in larger social formations, even between nations. Groups must trust that others will not use the resources they themselves have protected or overuse their own resources.

Lessons from TEK

Today, many environmental experts are interested in incorporating learnings from Indigenous societies into climate policies. In part, this is because recent studies have shown that environmental outcomes, such as forest cover, for example, are better in Indigenous protected areas.

It also stems from growing awareness of the need to protect Indigenous peoples' rights and sovereignty. TEK cannot be "extracted." Outsiders need to show deference to knowledge-holders and respectfully request their perspective.

One idea societies can adopt as they combat climate change is the importance of trust - which can feel hard to come by these days. Young activist Greta Thunberg's " Fridays for Future " initiative, for example, highlights the ethical issues of trust and responsibility between generations.

Many outdoor enthusiasts and sustainability organizations emphasize "leaving no trace." In fact, people always leave traces, no matter how small - a fact recognized in Siberian TEK. Even footsteps compact the soil and affect plant and animal life, no matter how careful we are.

A more TEK-like - and accurate - maxim might say, "Be accountable to your descendants for the traces you leave behind."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why the world has a lot to learn about conservation - and trust - from Indigenous societies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Twenty-five years ago, when I was a young anthropologist working in northern Siberia, the Indigenous hunters, fishers and trappers I lived with would often stop and solemnly offer something to the tundra. It was usually small, such as coins, buttons or unlit matches. But it was considered essential.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Guardian article, arguing that indigenous peoples were shut out of the Cop26 discussions - “literally and figuratively”. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Guardian article, arguing that indigenous peoples were shut out of the Cop26 discussions - “literally and figuratively”. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE To what extent to which indigenous people should be included in - and even leading - discussions, given that their ‘ecological civilizations’ are the models for all future societal development. Why have their ideas not been listened to more? How should inclusion in the debates be decided - based on expertise? Proximity to the problem? Culpability? Should the politicians be running the show, or climate scientists? How democratic should the summit and its discussions be? To explore who is calling the shots - and who should be calling the shots - you can check out the representation issue further in the Independent, CNBC, and EcoWatch.

Key terms Spin, Manipulated numbers, Glossy sponsorships, Power

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
op26 is officially over, and my time in Glasgow almost at an end. I was at the forum to represent my community and to stand up for First Nations people who are leading global movements for climate justice. I was cautiously optimistic about what could be achieved.

Instead, at this supposedly historic event, I saw a conference that relied on dated colonial constructs and ignored Indigenous people. I watched the Australian pavilion used to promote gas and carbon capture and storage, sponsored by corporations such as Santos. Outnumbered by fossil fuel lobbyists, First Nations people witnessed an aggressive big business approach to climate negotiations, hardly the turning away from and permanent closure of extractive, polluting industries that we are all calling for.

And I saw a lot of talk. Countries said they would be ambitious, but without implementation by all governments at all levels, these are just empty words when we desperately need action.

First Nations people were locked out of discussions, and as a result for me Cop26 has failed, denying us the right and ability to safeguard our futures. Doors were closed to us, both physical and metaphorical, but as the attenders disperse and return to their homes across the world, it is essential these are opened for us.

What happens next is critical. Globally, Australia arrogantly flaunts its high ranking on the lists of countries trying to soften global commitments to climate action, and recent analysis from Cop26 showed that Australia's per capita emissions from coal power nearly doubled those of China. In fact, Australia tops the class in this field.

But politics is the name of the game and, with a federal election looming and many state elections around the country to follow, it is here that we must strike. It is essential that First Nations people have a seat at the table and that we stand together to protect our country, our home. In some cases, we'll need to just build our own tables.

Tishiko King and fellow campaigners in Glasgow for Cop26. Photograph: Supplied

More than half the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in this country are younger than 25. Increasingly, young people are leading the way in many areas of social change for our communities. Young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people must be supported to lead the movement for climate justice and ensure our voice is heard on issues that affect us and our future.

First Nations young people see through the spin, the manipulated numbers, the glossy sponsorships, but perhaps most importantly we see the solutions. When I talk to communities they have boundless ideas for solutions to the climate crisis. Ideas that exist in the present, draw on the past and genuinely respond to the challenges communities across the country are facing. They are not just solutions for our communities but solutions that would benefit everyone.

While Cop26 failed, there is enormous power with the people. There is power in their actions, their voices, their votes

They tell us there is a need to shift away from an industrial civilisation to an ecological civilisation, in which traditional practices are embedded into everything we do, led by First Nations people.

Where they can, communities are already acting to make these changes reality. For example, in the Northern Territory, where Australia's first Indigenous youth climate network, Seed, is working with communities to protect country and water from dangerous gas fracking, communities are working to become energy self-sufficient and supply clean and cheap power with solar power and batteries. When communities have the freedom to define their own path, our people thrive, and they heal.

And when I reflect on my conversations with communities, I remember that, while Cop26 failed, there is enormous power with the people. There is power in their actions, their voices, their votes. So, while tired, I am not without hope.

I will continue to work with communities to elevate their voices and table their ideas for acting on a climate crisis which is very much already here. It's time to push doors previously closed to us open and bring others on the journey. In fact, it's time to tear those doors down all together. Because when First Nations people have a seat at the table, have a voice, have self-determination, all of our country wins.

Tishiko King is the campaigns director at Seed Mob and community organiser for Our Islands Our Home

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Empty words, no action: Cop26 has failed First Nations people | Tishiko King

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
op26 is officially over, and my time in Glasgow almost at an end. I was at the forum to represent my community and to stand up for First Nations people who are leading global movements for climate justice. I was cautiously optimistic about what could be achieved.

# data[].attributes.headline
A France24 article, analyzing whether Doha’s claim to be the first ever carbon-neutral World Cup stands up to scrutiny. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A France24 article, analyzing whether Doha’s claim to be the first ever carbon-neutral World Cup stands up to scrutiny. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE What claims is the Qatari government making about the World Cup? Why do some experts feel these promises are “absolutely not credible”? What examples does the article provide to support this view? What does this indicate about the difficulties evaluating whether organizations are really carbon neutral - or just greenwashing? Overall, to what extent should we accept the environmental credentials claimed by governments, businesses, and other organizations? What evidence should we use to evaluate these?

Key terms Greenwashing, Credible, Transparency

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
‘Greenwashing’ mars Qatar’s carbon-neutral World Cup promise

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When Qatar was awarded hosting duties for the biggest event in football, the Gulf nation promised to host “the first carbon neutral World Cup”. While organisers have introduced several green initiatives,…

# data[].attributes.headline
A Vox article, arguing that our mindset when approaching the climate crisis is now in a much better place. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Vox article, arguing that our mindset when approaching the climate crisis is now in a much better place. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE  What is the ‘finite pool of worry’ theory, and why is it no longer accepted in relation to the climate crisis (hint: use the terms ‘periphery’ and ‘core’ in your answer)? How does Lorraine Whitmarsh measure public perceptions of the climate crisis, and how difficult is this to achieve objectively? How might ‘habituation’ affect the way we view climate change? To wrap up: What responsibility lies with us in terms of creating the right mindset to understand and tackle the climate crisis?

KEY TERMS Finite pool of worry, Evidence, Intuitive sense, Availability heuristic, Interpret, Direct experiences, Peripheral vs. core issue, Habitation, Mere exposure effect, Collective delusion

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Our actions today will determine just how bad climate change will become. But which emotions best drive a person to become politically active? Hope? Anger? Persevering through complacency? What if the fundamental challenge is actually our attention?

This last question gets at a particular theory in psychology that has undergone a revolution in the past few years. It's a hypothesis called the " finite pool of worry," coined in 2006 by Elke Weber, a psychologist and Princeton University professor. It states that people can only handle so many negative events at a time. So when public concern about one issue rises, another concern should fall. The theory gained attention after the 2008 financial crisis for explaining why heightened economic worries led the public to tune out on climate.

But in the last few years, something wonkier has been going on. Polling did not find that concern about climate change shrank when the global Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, as theorists would have expected; it actually grew. According to researchers at Yale University and George Mason University, public understanding of the science that human activity is warming the planet increased in 2020, and has roughly maintained those levels since. The issue has especially risen in importance among Democratic voters, who overwhelmingly view climate change as a major threat.

Weber herself recognized her theory needed revising after studying the Covid effect, and so did other researchers studying other countries. One of these researchers is Lorraine Whitmarsh, an environmental psychologist at the University of Bath, who co-authored a paper in 2021 that found "very little evidence" to support the hypothesis on the finite pool of worry for climate change.

I asked Whitmarsh how they might now think about public views on climate change. Understanding what drives people to take action on climate change is a specialty of Whitmarsh's, and we spoke about how the range of emotions people may experience influences behavior. The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Leber

The finite pool of worry made a lot of intuitive sense to explain why concern about climate change would change over time. When did it become clear there were cracks in the theory?

Lorraine Whitmarsh

There was quite a lot of broader psychological research to support this idea that people can only worry about a limited number of things at one time - whatever is top of mind. There's this cognitive bias called "the availability heuristic," which means that I'm only going to be worried about something that occurred in the recent past.

Over the past 20 or 30 years, media coverage had a strong agenda-setting effect on the issue. Polling suggested concern about climate change would wax and wane with whatever was in the news media, and to some extent, people's own experiences.

We hypothesized that the pandemic logically should completely displace concern about climate change. It's a massive crisis, everybody's worried about it, so surely, we don't have enough worry left for climate change. But we found throughout the polling that we did over the last few years, concern was either maintained or at various points even grew. It seemed like Covid was not displacing concern about climate change.

Rebecca Leber

How should we interpret this?

Lorraine Whitmarsh

Now, climate change seems to be a core worry - it has moved from the periphery to the core.

Climate change is reinforced regularly by what's in the media and people's direct experiences. I think the finite pool of worry theory needs a bit of nuance, distinguishing between core worries and peripheral worries.

Rebecca Leber

Your study on the finite pool of worry relied on a mix of social media and polling to determine how the public was feeling about climate change. Which method do you consider to be a more accurate reflection of public opinion?

Lorraine Whitmarsh

Neither polling nor social media gives a complete view. Social surveys are self-reported, so they will be partly people wanting to promote this image that they are a good person. And there will be other relevant factors - what's the temperature at the moment? What have people just said to me that will influence how you're feeling at that point in time, and how are the questions asked? There are lots of factors that will mean you're only getting a partial view of what people really think. And particularly if you're interested in behavior, then it's very limited because people will say they do things and there will often be that gap between what they say and what they do.

Social media gives a different view, in that you're seeing what people are actually saying without it being constructed by the researcher. In that sense, it's more objective, but it's a subset of people with usually very strong views, constructing a particular media for a particular audience. It's a distorted view, but it's one particular insight into what society's thinking. But bringing them together is really valuable because while they're limited in their own ways, together they can tell you something.

Rebecca Leber

If climate change has moved from a peripheral to a core issue for many people, wouldn't repeat disasters cause more fatigue or complacency? Is there the risk that we adjust to heat, wildfires, and worse storms as the "new normal" and the climate crisis becomes easier to ignore?

Lorraine Whitmarsh

The issue of habitation - the more that we experience something, the more we get used to it - is a competing idea to the availability heuristic.

These extreme weather events are still periodic events. It seems unlikely in the near future that they would be so regular that we would completely habituate. We do have these fluctuations in people's concerns, like when we've had some extreme weather events. During those moments, concern about climate change does seem to go up.

Rebecca Leber

So, what I'm hearing is rather than worrying about bumming people out, we should all be talking about climate change even more.

Lorraine Whitmarsh

There's something called the "mere exposure effect," that the more people see and hear something, the more it becomes relevant and something that they need to pay attention to. That's why advertising works. To some extent, it's just showing the same thing 1,000 times and when they are in a situation, they'll be familiar with it.

With climate change, we absolutely need to break the spiral of silence. We need to embed it much more in discussions so that people can see that this is something that isn't going away. The climate crisis is not just relevant when there's a drought or another extreme weather event; we need to have it on the agenda when we're talking about energy issues and air quality issues and everything else.

There's also a big role for government here to really put climate change on the agenda and talk to the public so that there's a societal dialogue happening about what are we going to do about climate change and showing people what they can do to be part of the solution.

Rebecca Leber

Unfortunately, real solutions aren't always accessible for people. So maybe they're trying to grapple with burnout and a learned helplessness.

Lorraine Whitmarsh

There's a huge amount of research that shows just giving people information by itself does very little to change behavior. It might change people's attitudes a bit. It might inform them, educate them, and motivate them to want to do something. But it often doesn't actually turn into behavior change because there will be barriers like cost and convenience. Those barriers tend to be reduced by policy action like incentives and disincentives, regulations, as well as what businesses can do to make products attractive and cheaper.

A lot of that is policy; it's what governments can do. That might be making low-carbon options cheaper, for example, and making them more available. It might be changing social norms so low-carbon consumption is seen as aspirational as opposed to a sacrifice or deviant.

Rebecca Leber

I'd like to hear your thoughts on a recent study published in the scientific journal Global Environmental Changethat surveyed 2,000 Norwegian adults on how they felt about climate change. One of their findings was that anger was the strongest emotion associated with driving people to take part in a protest.

How important is anger in driving collective action?

Lorraine Whitmarsh

We know emotions are a really important driver of people's behavior. But it is still true that while anger might motivate climate activism, which is one subset of behavior, we also need to engender some sense of hope and agency.

There's a compelling example in trying to get people to reduce health risk behaviors such as smoking and having unsafe sex: What health psychologists found is that attempts to influence change can backfire when you talk about the risks but you don't pair that with a message of what they can do about it. People will just ignore the bad news unless they're given some sort of action strategy to tackle it. Really it's more about self-efficacy - there is something you can do - than of hope.

People will find it harder to tackle climate change than to protect their own health, so we absolutely need self-efficacy and a message of why you should care. Maybe making people angrier, too.

Rebecca Leber

This made me think about hope. Because the study, among other research, found a lot of complacency among respondents. Perhaps many of us are actually too hopeful and not angry enough?

Lorraine Whitmarsh

I really think that's the big question. Are people unrealistically hopeful? There's talk of collective delusion, and obviously, the Don't Look Up movie was more or less about being ridiculously, overly optimistic and ignoring this risk at our own peril.

If you talk to scientists, they are much more worried than the public. That suggests that people are perhaps unrealistically optimistic and that it's not yet clear how much will have to change, how serious the risks are, and how quickly those risks are accelerating.

Rebecca Leber

The realization of those things could lead to fear. Could that be a good thing?

Lorraine Whitmarsh

Fear often sits behind anxiety, and there's been growing attention to climate anxiety. We don't see that climate anxiety is really widespread among populations, but it is higher among younger people. Often it motivates action. What we found was that there is a positive relationship between climate anxiety and taking action to tackle climate change. Fear can be a motivator in the same way that we were just saying about anger.

Rebecca Leber

Do you have any advice for people who work and volunteer on climate who are dealing with intense emotions?

Lorraine Whitmarsh

It can be really overwhelming to be thinking about this all the time. Obviously, there are things you can do like taking time out, but what's very likely to help people is taking action to feel they're making some progress. They're taking back control. If you can do that with other people, then you're more likely to feel that collectively you're going to make a difference.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
There's been a shift in how we think about climate change

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A climate psychologist explains how we've moved beyond hope, anger, and complacency toward something more promising.

# data[].attributes.headline
A BBC Future article, exploring the phenomenon of anthropomorphising threats and disasters that face society. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A BBC Future article, exploring the phenomenon of anthropomorphising threats and disasters that face society. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE  What has recent scientific research revealed about the human “penchant for personification”, and which philosopher does it link to? How does anthropomorphism produce a sense of psychological relief in terms of dealing with uncertainty? In what ways can anthropomorphism protect us from health risks, and how have authorities drawn on this? What insights does this tendency provide us about religion? To wrap up: “humans cannot help but populate the world with imaginary beings created in our own image.” What does David Robson mean, and how does this impact on us navigating the world?

KEY TERMS Personifying natural phenomena, Conscious intent, Humanising language, Cope with the uncertainty, Psychological relief, Imaginary beings

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A movie extra dressed as the grim reaper in New York City (Credit: Getty Images)

As hurricanes Lee and Margot sweep across the US, David Robson looks at why we name the things that threaten us - and whether this is helpful.

How do you picture a menace that creeps into your home unannounced and takes your loved ones?

In plague-infested Europe, the answer was the skeletal, hooded figure that we have come to know as the Grim Reaper. He first emerged in the 14th Century, during the time of the Black Death, as wave after wave of the infection (caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis) swept across the continent and killed half its population.

The exact form of this macabre being may vary from country to country - "Death" may be young or old, male or female, dressed in white or black - but most folklores across history represent illness and death in a human form.

Following the scientific Enlightenment, you might think we would avoid personifying natural phenomena and imbuing them with conscious intent. Yet a quick look at the imagery people used to describe Covid-19 suggests otherwise, with many commentators describing the virus if it had the conscious intention to destroy humanity. Cartoons depicted the virus with arms, legs and an evil grin, while US President Donald Trump spoke of it as " tough and smart". Some scientists have even started giving the different variants nicknames inspired by mythology.

Our responses to extreme weather reveal the same tendency. We give hurricanes and storms the same names we might give our children, and describe their actions in the humanising language of wrath and vengeance. We can even see it in our angry reactions to IT issues - every time we curse our computers or cajole our smartphones, we are demonstrating the automatic urge to anthropomorphise inanimate objects.

According to recent scientific research, our penchant for personification is a natural human reaction to unpredictable event, and while it is often harmless, it can sometimes lead us to underplay the real risks of the situation. It all depends on the specific characters that we create and the features we give them.

The foundations of this scientific theory can be traced to the Scottish philosopher David Hume. "There is a universal tendency among mankind to consider all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquaintance, and of which they are intimately conscious," he wrote in The Natural History of Religion, published in 1757. "We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good will to everything that hurts or pleases us."

In the US, tropical storms have been given human names since World War Two (Credit: Getty Images)

Hume proposed that this was a way for us to cope with the uncertainty of the world - the "perpetual suspense between life and death, health and sickness, plenty and want, which are distributed amongst the human species by secret and unknown causes". Imagining a human-like mind behind events may be irrational, but it forestalls the panic that would be provoked by recognising our sheer inability to understand what has happened and to predict the likeliness of a future event.

Hurricane names

US officials first began naming tropical storms during World War Two, and in 1953 the process was formalised - though initially, they were all named after women. Today the names are chosen by the World Meteorological Organization, which has a strict six-year rotation of male and female titles. In 2028, the US will brace itself for Atlantic tropical cyclones Gaston, Tobias, Paula and Bonnie, and Eastern North Pacific cyclones Zeke, Howard, Celia and Roslyn, among others. In the Central North Pacific, the names in use are more diverse - with Hawaiian names such as Malia and Ekeka.

Until the 20th Century, Hume's assertions were purely theoretical. In the 1940s, however, an iconic experiment confirmed his suspicions and revealed that it takes surprisingly little to trick the mind into seeing human-like intention. Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel from Smith College, Massachusetts showed their participants an animated film of geometric shapes - a large triangle, a small triangle, and a circle, moving around a screen. There is no scenery apart from a basic box with a flap. At one point, the small triangle and the circle enter the box and the flap closes.

There are no facial expressions, no faces, and no signs of body language in these purely abstract figures - yet most of the participants offered highly anthropomorphic language to describe what they had seen, and they often provided personality profiles of the different shapes. They saw it as a love story, for instance, in which the two triangles are both vying for the circle - and end up fighting over her affection. The bigger triangle was considered to be a "bully" or "villain"; he (most agreed it was male) was "aggressive" and "sly"; one participant claimed that Big Triangle must have been "blinded by rage and frustration" when his love rival escapes with the circle.

The effectance motivation

Would the participants have created such rich stories, full of intention and emotion, if the shapes had been acting more predictably? According to Hume, the answer would be no; when it came to natural phenomena, he argued that we anthropomorphise to understand things that otherwise wouldn't make sense. Psychologists describe this as the "effectance motivation" of anthropomorphism - and researchers such as Adam Waytz at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have now found good evidence for the idea.

Waytz's research primarily examined our tendency to anthropomorphise technology. In the first study, they questioned people about their own computers. They had to rate how often they faced problems with the device, and how much it appeared to "behave as if it has its own beliefs and desires". The results were exactly as predicted: the less reliable the participants' devices, the more they saw it acting with a mind of its own.

The team's next experiments all revealed the same trend. They asked participants to consider different types of devices, for example, some of which behaved more erratically than others. They were told about a clock, for example, that would either run away from you, or jump on top of you, when you hit the snooze button. The random nature of its behaviour considerably increased the participants' ratings of the device's apparent "free will" or "consciousness", compared with similar devices that lacked this element of surprise.

Humans have a natural tendency to see human faces and other patterns where there are none - a phenomenon known as pareidolia (Credit:Alamy)

An anthropomorphic bias was even reflected in fMRI brain scans. When learning about the unpredictable devices, the participants had heightened activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. These areas that were already known to be involved in "mentalising" - that is, placing ourselves in other people's shoes and trying to understand their motives. The researchers conclude that "perceiving an agent as having a mind of its own may not be mere metaphor" - our brains are trying to consider the device's behaviour as if it were literally another person.

In their final experiment, Waytz and his colleagues directly tested whether anthropomorphism successfully reduces the feelings of uncertainty - and to do so, they returned to a version of the film that Heider and Simmel had used in their classic study from the mid-1940s, with geometric shapes running around a screen.

This time, the researchers wanted to actively encourage or discourage anthropomorphism to measure its consequences, and so they set up two sets of instructions. Before watching the clip, some were told:

"When watching these shapes, we want you try to get inside of their minds and think

about them in the same way you would think about other people."

Others were instructed:

"When watching these shapes, we want you to remain detached and think only about the observable behaviours they are performing and think about them as you might think about any other unfamiliar objects."

Afterwards, the participants were asked to rate how much they understood the shapes, and how much they could predict their future behaviour. In line with the idea that anthropomorphism arises from an effectance motivation, the instructions to "get inside the shapes' minds" increased both these ratings.

Given these results, the personification of Covid-19 may have been a natural reaction to the huge uncertainty of the pandemic, Waytz suspects. "The desire for sense-making over a very unpredictable situation, led people to anthropomorphise the disease," he says.

Lady Luck and Mr Coronavirus

The sense of control can offer useful comfort. "Our work has shown that people do feel a sense of predictability and understanding over things they anthropomorphise," Waytz says, "so regardless of whether they actually understand those things it does provide a sense of psychological relief."

The long-term consequences will depend on the context, however. At its worst, anthropomorphism can exacerbate irrational behaviour. Consider our perceptions of good fortune and the ways that it can influence our financial decision making. Katina Kulow at the University of Louisville and colleagues recently asked participants to report how much they anthropomorphised luck by rating statements such as: "To what extent does luck have intentions?" Kulow found that the more they attributed human-like characteristics to matters of chance, the more likely they were to opt for riskier choices when gambling. That's worth remembering, whenever you think that "Lady Luck" might be on your side.

One of the most recent Covid-19 strains has been named the "kraken" after the creature from Scandinavian mythology (Credit: Getty Images)

When it comes to our health, however, anthropomorphism may protect us from risk. Personifying an illness seems to make the danger feel closer and increases people's sense of vulnerability, and this encourages us to take suitable precautions, according to research by Lili Wang at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and colleagues.

In the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, they gave participants one of two messages offering information about ways to avoid infection. The only difference between the messages was the level of anthropomorphism - whether the text referred to "the coronavirus" or "Mr Coronavirus", for example.

"You can meet Mr Coronavirus through contact with an infected person when they cough or sneeze. You can also run into him when you touch a surface or object that has the virus on it, then touch your eyes, nose, or mouth," they were told. "There's currently no vaccine to keep Mr Coronavirus at bay, but you can protect yourself and others by keeping your hands clean, not touching your face, avoiding close contact with people outside of your household, and taking other common-sense measures to limit your exposure (eg staying home)."

"The idea is to make the disease seem as if it is up to something and in motion," Wang and her colleagues explained to BBC Future in an email. Despite constituting relatively small differences in language, the personification of the virus increased people's intentions to comply with the recommendations.

To replicate the result, the team conducted similar experiments for a variety of other diseases - and found very similar results each time. Whether the participants were examining information about vaccination for yellow fever, screening for breast cancer, sunscreen to avoid skin cancer, or means to reduce high blood pressure, messages that anthropomorphised the relevant illness encouraged greater compliance with the medical advice.

Given these results, Wang suggests anthropomorphism could be a helpful tactic in public health campaigns. While visual cues could also be helpful, Wang says that it may be tricky to strike the right tone. "An important concern though is that the visual cues could seem too cartoonlike or cutesy for a serious disease," he adds.

Looking back over human history, some researchers have argued that our anthropomorphic bias might have given birth to religious deities. Those stories could have started out as vague suspicions of human-like intentions behind an unexpected event, and then over time evolved into complex belief systems. In many cases, these involve detailed descriptions of the particular figures and their power, along with traditions that were designed to appease them.

Hume proposed as much in The Natural History of Religion, and modern scientists tend to agree. "Everyday abilities to recognize and infer the mental states of other humans and to represent goals and intentions also allows people to represent, reason about, and in turn believe in, a variety of supernatural agents," writes Will Gervais at the University of Kentucky in a scientific paper on the subject. "The ability to represent gods emerges as a cognitive by-product of the human capability to perceive minds," he continues.

The available evidence supports the idea. Feelings of uncertainty are likely to increase beliefs in religious or paranormal figures, for example, and brain scans show that these beliefs often share the same neural underpinnings as other forms of anthropomorphism.

Whether we are shouting at our laptops, avoiding Mr Coronavirus or Tropical Storm Margot - the latest hurricane to form in the Atlantic - or thanking Lady Luck, it seems that humans cannot help but populate the world with imaginary beings created in our own image.

David Robson is a science writer and author of The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life, published by Canongate (UK) and Henry Holt (USA). He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.

Copyright 2023 BBC. All rights reserved. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read about our approach to external linking.

Beta Terms By using the Beta Site, you agree that such use is at your own risk and you know that the Beta Site may include known or unknown bugs or errors, that we have no obligation to make this Beta Site available with or without charge for any period of time, nor to make it available at all, and that nothing in these Beta Terms or your use of the Beta Site creates any employment relationship between you and us. The Beta Site is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis and we make no warranty to you of any kind, express or implied.

In case of conflict between these Beta Terms and the BBC Terms of Use these Beta Terms shall prevail.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As hurricanes Lee and Margot sweep across the US, David Robson looks at why we name the things that threaten us - and whether this is helpful.

# data[].attributes.headline
An FT article, which explores whether we have become too fixated on the numbers attached to the climate crisis.

# data[].attributes.subject
An FT article, which explores whether we have become too fixated on the numbers attached to the climate crisis.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why can conveying the dangers of climate change via ‘magic numbers’ lead to problems? How has the Covid pandemic influenced the way climate messaging is carried out? Why are some scientists arguing that you have to link climate change to ‘everyday experiences’? Overall, how do we ensure that big ideas in science are communicated with resonance?

KEY TERMS Magic numbers, Exactitude, Cut-offs, Awareness vs. fear, Deadline-ism

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Access error: the page you are trying to access is unavailable. Please wait a moment and try again.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Verdict article, looking at how climate change has left Tuvalu with “no alternative but to pioneer the concept of a digital nation.”

# data[].attributes.subject
A Verdict article, looking at how climate change has left Tuvalu with “no alternative but to pioneer the concept of a digital nation.”

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE What threat is facing TuValu? How are they intending to use AI technology to help them respond to this threat? What does the article mean when it says the project is more “palliative than preventative”? To wrap up: What constitutes a country’s cultural heritage, and what should we do in order to safeguard it against existential threats?

KEY TERMS Preserve and maintain, Digital nation, Cultural heritage, palliative vs. preventative True conservation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Digital twins: a new tool for ecological preservation?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Digital twins are digital representations of physical assets, systems, or processes. They help to detect, prevent, predict, and optimise.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Newsweek video and a Guardian article, examining - depending on your perspective - NYC’s ‘woke war on pizza’ or ‘attempt to improve air quality’.

# data[].attributes.subject
A Newsweek video and a Guardian article, examining - depending on your perspective - NYC’s ‘woke war on pizza’ or ‘attempt to improve air quality’.

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE From the Newsweek video/article: What is going on in New York City, and why? From the Guardian: How is this issue more complicated than the way Scott LoBaido portrays it? What key pieces of additional detail do they provide about what’s going on? Why has this issue become so polarized? Does it seem possible to arrive at some sort of resolution? To conclude: How do our political perspectives prompt us to take ‘cognitive shortcuts’ when exploring issues? What are the consequences of doing so?

KEY TERMS Protest (Newsweek), Distorted account, Misleading, Expert, Misconception (Guardian)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New York City Hall pelted with pizza in anti-woke wood oven backlash

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The demonstrator hit out at “woke-ass punks” and shouted, “Give us pizza, or give us death!”

# data[].attributes.headline
A Vox article, exploring where the line is between climate pessimism and complacent optimism when it comes to the state of the environment. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Vox article, exploring where the line is between climate pessimism and complacent optimism when it comes to the state of the environment. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE What examples does she give that support optimism about the future? How does Hannah RItchie’s conceptual framework assess the future, and what characterizes each quadrant? In what ways can we become more optimistic about the future? Overall, how does our mindset determine the reality of the effects of climate change? How can we ensure that our outlook supports rather than undermines effective climate action?

KEY TERMS Doomer culture, Accurate vs. useful, Truth, Paralyzing anxiety, Progress, Complacency trap

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This story is part of a group of stories called

Vox's home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

We environmentalists spend our lives thinking about ways the world will end. There's nowhere that I see doomer culture more vocal than on my home turf.

With leading activists like Roger Hallam, co-founder of the popular climate protest movement Extinction Rebellion, telling young people that they "face annihilation," it's no surprise so many of them feel terrified. In a large recent international survey on youth attitudes toward climate change, more than half said that "humanity is doomed" and three-quarters said the future is frightening. Young people have good reasons to worry about our ability to tackle climate change, but this level of despair should be alarming to anyone who cares about the well-being of future generations - which is, after all, what the climate movement is all about.

As the lead researcher for Our World in Data, an organization that aims to make data on the world's biggest problems accessible and understandable, I've written extensively on the reasons to be optimistic about the future. The prices of solar and wind power, as well as of batteries for storing low-carbon energy, have all plunged. Global deforestation peaked decades ago and has been slowly declining. Sales of new gas and diesel cars are now falling. Coal is starting to die in many countries. Government commitments are getting closer to limiting global warming to 2°C. Deaths from natural disasters - despite what news about climate change-related fires and hurricanes might appear to suggest - are a fraction of what they used to be. The list goes on.

But here, I don't want to talk about whether pessimism is accurate. I want to focus on whether it's useful. People might defend doomsday scenarios as the wake-up call that society needs. If they're exaggerated, so what? They might be the crucial catalyst that gets us to act on climate change.

Setting aside the moral problem of stretching the truth, this claim is wrong. Scaring people into action doesn't work. That's true not just for climate change, air pollution, and biodiversity loss, but for almost any issue we can think of. We need optimism to make progress - yet that alone isn't enough. To contend with environmental crises and make life better for everyone, we need the right kind of optimists: those who recognize that the world will only improve if we fight for it.

A framework for bringing about societal change

To understand what sort of thinking does drive positive change, we can imagine a framework for how people conceptualize the future and their ability to shape it.

Credit where it's due: I first saw a version of this concept in the venture capitalist Peter Thiel's book . He presented it in the context of entrepreneurship, but it tied perfectly with my experiences in the environmental space. I've adapted it.

My framework has two axes. On one axis, we have "level of optimism," spanning from optimistic to pessimistic. People who think the future will be much better are on one end, and those who think it will be much worse are on the other.

On the other axis, we have "changeability." This reflects how much people think the future can be shaped by the decisions we make today. People who think the world is changeable believe they have an agency to mold it, while those who think it's unchangeable believe we're on a predetermined path and that trying to shape the future is futile.

This gives us four quadrants - but only one really matters for our purposes. The "optimistic and changeable" box is where people who move the world forward fall. We need more people in there. None of the other quadrants are effective. By exploring the characteristics of each person, we'll see why.

Pessimists doom most of humanity to a terrible future

Pessimists in the lower right-hand quadrant, those who think the future is not changeable, are the true doomers. Their position is that we're screwed and there's nothing we can do about it.

I used to be one. After completing several degrees in environmental science and following the climate movement closely for years, I became submerged by helplessness at the scale of the environmental problems we face. Despite it being my lifelong passion, I was ready to turn my back on the field and work on something else. The idea that I could do anything had been slowly beaten out of me.

Unchangeable pessimists have given up on agitating for change, and experience high levels of anxiety and despondency. But it's important to realize that not all levels of anxiety are equal, or equally arresting. Research shows that some anxiety can be a strong predictor of positive, constructive action. It can be a signal that we're unhappy with how things are and give us an initial trigger to act. But it's useless unless combined with hope that things really can get better.

What unchangeable pessimists feel is paralyzing anxiety. That's a horrible place to be in emotionally, but it's also an ineffective one. It prevents people from actually going out and doing things to mitigate climate change.

There is a second flavor of pessimism: those in the lower left-hand quadrant of our framework, who are resigned to a doomed future but think that rather than do nothing, we must prepare for the inevitable.

This group is just as anxious as the unchangeable pessimists. But rather than being despondent, they become self-serving and indignant. They do all they can to protect themselves and whatever morsels of a livable planet are left.

Changeable pessimists promote extreme and divisive environmental solutions that are unrealistic and would leave many far worse off. Extinction Rebellion, for example, has called for the UK to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. It's undeniable that the UK has to reduce its emissions rapidly, but many scientists agree that a 2025 deadline would be unworkable and damaging because we don't have replacements ready to fill the energy gap.

An immediate boycott of fossil fuels would result in a humanitarian disaster because the world still overwhelmingly relies on them to meet everyday energy needs. This way of thinking doesn't rationally weigh the costs and benefits of trying to radically reduce our resource use overnight. It represents a kind of self-preservation for people in affluent countries: Rather than looking outward to build international cooperation, it pushes countries and communities to look inward.

At its extreme, changeable pessimism is susceptible to the sort of ideas advanced by biologist Paul Ehrlich, who has been predicting environmental collapse due to human overpopulation for over half a century. It's an approach that assumes - against our past experience - that it's impossible for humans to overcome perceived environmental limits, and that we have to impose devastating austerity instead. It would sacrifice the well-being of some of the poorest people on the planet, who need both growth and energy. This is no way to solve global challenges. But it's an inevitable outcome of a scarcity mindset.

Optimism is the only thing that works - but only if we don't assume that progress is inevitable

Now we turn to the optimists.

The "unchangeable optimists," those in the upper right-hand corner of our chart, are a dangerous group. They assume the world will continue to get better regardless of how hard we work to change it. They look at historical progress and believe it'll just continue.

Complacency can get us into trouble. We should never think that our rapid progress in health care, energy, technology, and education over the past two centuries was natural or preordained. It has been an unprecedented boom, and it's required deliberate action from people who were not happy with the status quo.

And today, we need to adapt and push in different directions than we have in the past. Yes, we've made amazing strides in human well-being, but we now have very large, very novel problems to tackle: environmental ones. Sticking with what got us here won't solve those.

Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas-Not Less, is a classic unchangeable optimist. He rightly argues that fossil fuels have transformed the lives of billions, and says we should, for now, continue to exploit them to improve more lives. But this fails to acknowledge the problems with fossil fuels - not only for the climate but for the millions of people who die from air pollution linked to fossil fuels every year. Epstein's argument may have made sense in the past, when we did not have affordable, scalable alternative energy sources, but not now.

Fossil fuel boosters demonstrate perfectly why unchangeable optimists are so wrongheaded: They want to maintain a status quo that doesn't serve us anymore. Their complacency only serves to slow the accelerated action needed to change our trajectory.

As a self-identified optimist, I'm always in danger of being boxed into this category. I fight hard to stop the label from sticking. I believe that if the arc of history bends toward justice, it's because we've made a concerted effort to change its trajectory. The path we're heading on is not okay - we need to redirect it.

This brings me to the changeable optimists. This is the group that thinks the future can be better but knows that a better future won't happen on its own. The world has lots of optimist changemakers, even if they don't identify as such. People engineering new solar panels, batteries, and electric cars are changeable optimists. So are scientists at organizations like the Good Food Institute experimenting with ways to make plant-based and cellular meats; entrepreneurs like Boyan Slat, whose organization the Ocean Cleanup is trying to pull plastic waste out of the ocean; and policymakers pushing for sustainable policies.

These people might not always put high odds on a better future - they may, in fact, think there's only a slim chance of success. But the act of trying creates possibilities that no one knew about before, which build a concrete case for optimism. Several years ago, for example, most wouldn't have predicted that renewable energy prices would drop so quickly and dramatically.

Changeable optimists don't shy away from criticism of the status quo. In fact, they're often its fiercest critics. People often mistake pessimism for critical thought and optimism for pollyannaism. In reality, progress is built by those who can look critically at a suite of solutions, discard the bad ones, and find and sharpen the gems that remain. Pessimists use criticism as a wall, while optimists use it as a guiding door.

How we can become more optimistic

Pessimism is hard to overcome precisely because it's often served humans well. History rewarded those who could detect threats early and fixate on them. But while pessimism might be good for survival - and survival was virtually all humanity had on its mind for most of its history - it's not good for the flourishing we could achieve in the future. At its best, pessimism helps us stay where we are. It doesn't give us the agency and determination to build something better.

The world would be a much better place if we had more optimistic changemakers. But there are key habits of mind I've found that can engender precisely the brand of optimism we need.

Most importantly, optimists take a long-term view of human progress. Many people forget how bad the human past was. Until the last century, poverty was the default. Half of children died before puberty. Health care and education were nonexistent for virtually everyone. Even with respect to environmental health, our preindustrial history was not as rosy as one might assume. The air our ancestors breathed was polluted from burning wood and charcoal; evidence of damaged lung tissue has been found in Egyptian mummies and in the remains of 400,000-year-old hunter-gatherers. The only reason our aggregate planetary impact was low is that high child mortality kept the human population small. We hunted many of the largest mammals into extinction. To think that the world today is dismal is to ignore the misery of our past.

Even if you accept that we've made enormous progress from the past, you might look at the scale of the threats we face in the future and lose hope that progress will continue. But in thinking about today's challenges, it's crucial to look at change over time, not just snapshots in time. During any transition, changes can look small at first; it's the pace of change that's important. Renewable energy right now makes up just 29 percent of global electricity production, but this is changing quickly. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that almost all of the growth in electricity use in the next few years will come from renewables. Electric vehicles made up just under 10 percent of new car sales globally in 2021, but in 2020 it was 4 percent, and the year before that, it was 2.5. It won't be long until EVs dominate the car market.

Focusing on change over time doesn't make us optimistic by default. The early days of Covid-19 are a case in point: Many people underestimated the scale of the pandemic because they were looking at snapshots of reported cases and deaths. In early 2020, these were tiny. What they should have been focusing on was the rate at which these numbers were climbing, which told a much more worrying story. Looking at change over time doesn't always paint a rosy picture, but it does help us see the world more clearly and understand what future we might be heading toward - and, in most respects, seeing the world more clearly means seeing it more positively.

Similarly, we need to look at the complete picture, not isolated individual metrics, to understand complex problems. Global carbon emissions are still rising, which is bad. But many of the underlying factors that determine emissions - like the growth of low-carbon energy and the emissions of wealthy countries - are changing quickly. We need to look at the inputs into the system, not just the output. We'll soon reach a tipping point when these inputs cause emissions to peak and decline, according to the IEA.

Finally, we should probably stop constantly reading the news. I used to read the news obsessively, thinking this was how to be knowledgeable about the world. Every day I was hit with stories about the latest hurricane, flood, drought, or wildfire. The problem is that I didn't actually know whether the impacts of these events were increasing or decreasing. I thought more people were dying from disasters than ever, but only because I mistook an increase in reporting and my own interest for an increase in the numbers.

When I looked at the long-term statistics, I realized my perception was upside-down. The news isn't a reliable barometer for the overall state of the world. I've found that pessimists look at the news, while optimists look at the data.

We must avoid complacent optimism

I often worry that people confuse changeable optimism with its counterproductive, unchangeable counterpart. That's just as ineffective as pessimism. To avoid falling into the complacency trap, we need to hold on to an edge of dissatisfaction. Yes, many trends have been moving in the right direction, but we shouldn't pretend that this was the best we could do.

As my colleague Max Roser has put it: "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better." All three statements are true. We can acknowledge the progress that we've made but remain dissatisfied that we haven't made more. We've reduced global child mortality to below 4 percent, but 5 million children under age 5 still die every year, most of them from preventable conditions like malaria, measles, and diarrheal diseases.

We can learn from this long-term decline in childhood mortality to understand what does and doesn't work. But we then need to turn those lessons into action in places where child mortality remains high, which won't happen on its own.

We also need to be honest about the areas where things haven't been going well. Human progress has come at the cost of the environment and the lives of tens of billions of non-human animals that we slaughter for food. That may have been a price worth paying in the past, but we shouldn't - and don't have to - accept it anymore. Technological progress can build sustainability that works for people, the planet, and the species we share it with.
Hannah Ritchie is deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data, and a researcher at the University of Oxford.
This is a totally different trajectory from the past, and a track that complacent, unchangeable optimism won't get us on. Optimistic but dissatisfied is the road to progress. Let's make sure this coalition is as large and diverse as possible.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
We need the right kind of climate optimism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Vox's home for ambitious stories that explain our world. We environmentalists spend our lives thinking about ways the world will end. There's nowhere that I see doomer culture more vocal than on my home turf.

# data[].attributes.headline
A New Statesman article, speculating that Van Gogh would have loved activists covering one of his sunflowers paintings in soup. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A New Statesman article, speculating that Van Gogh would have loved activists covering one of his sunflowers paintings in soup. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE How have people reacted to a recent protest by Just Stop Oil activists? Why does the writer feel that Van Gogh would have approved of their protests? What relationship does the article say art has with ethical issues in general, and environmental ones in particular? Overall, do you agree that “Art demands that we think, and challenges us to question the status quo”? How far should we apply this?

KEY TERMS Abstraction and experimentation, Radical, Sites of protest, Bigger picture, Alert

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Van Gogh would have loved his soup-covered Sunflowers – and so should we

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Safe protest stunts raise the profile of the climate crisis and ask us to think about the bigger picture.

# data[].attributes.headline
Two articles - from the Guardian and the Conversation - look at what we can learn about climate denial from the movie Don’t Look Up. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Two articles - from the Guardian and the Conversation - look at what we can learn about climate denial from the movie Don’t Look Up. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE (See the Conversation article here) Students will gain a lot from watching the movie, as it deals with many TOK-friendly ideas. Why does Kalmus believe the film “captures the madness I see every day” - and what is this madness? How can movies such as this one help climate scientists to do their job, despite being fictional? Looking at the second article, what are the “five myths that fuel the rejection of climate science”?

KEY TERMS Accurate, Gaslighted, 100% certain, Public communication

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
he movie Don't Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it's also the most accurate film about society's terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I've seen.

The film, from director Adam McKay and writer David Sirota, tells the story of astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her PhD adviser, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a comet - a "planet killer" - that will impact the Earth in just over six months. The certainty of impact is 99.7%, as certain as just about anything in science.

The scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel. In one scene, Mindy hyperventilates in a bathroom; in another, Dibiasky, on national TV, screams "Are we not being clear? We're all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!" I can relate. This is what it feels like to be a climate scientist today.

The two astronomers are given a 20-minute audience with the president (Meryl Streep), who is glad to hear that impact isn't technically 100% certain. Weighing election strategy above the fate of the planet, she decides to "sit tight and assess". Desperate, the scientists then go on a national morning show, but the TV hosts make light of their warning (which is also overshadowed by a celebrity breakup story).

By now, the imminent collision with comet Dibiasky is confirmed by scientists around the world. After political winds shift, the president initiates a mission to divert the comet, but changes her mind at the last moment when urged to do so by a billionaire donor (Mark Rylance) with his own plan to guide it to a safe landing, using unproven technology, in order to claim its precious metals. A sports magazine's cover asks, "The end is near. Will there be a Super Bowl?"

But this isn't a film about how humanity would respond to a planet-killing comet; it's a film about how humanity is responding to planet-killing climate breakdown. We live in a society in which, despite extraordinarily clear, present, and worsening climate danger, more than half of Republican members of Congress still say climate change is a hoax and many more wish to block action, and in which the official Democratic party platform still enshrines massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry; in which the current president ran on a promise that "nothing will fundamentally change", and the speaker of the House dismissed even a modest climate plan as "the green dream or whatever"; in which the largest delegation to Cop26 was the fossil fuel industry, and the White House sold drilling rights to a huge tract of the Gulf of Mexico after the summit; in which world leaders say that climate is an "existential threat to humanity" while simultaneously expanding fossil fuel production; in which major newspapers still run fossil fuel ads, and climate news is routinely overshadowed by sports; in which entrepreneurs push incredibly risky tech solutions and billionaires sell the absurdist fantasy that humanity can just move to Mars.

World leaders underestimate how rapid, serious and permanent ecological breakdown will be if humanity fails to mobilize

After 15 years of working to raise climate urgency, I've concluded that the public in general, and world leaders in particular, underestimate how rapid, serious and permanent climate and ecological breakdown will be if humanity fails to mobilize. There may only be five years left before humanity expends the remaining "carbon budget" to stay under 1.5C of global heating at today's emissions rates - a level of heating I am not confident will be compatible with civilization as we know it. And there may only be five years before the Amazon rainforest and a large Antarctic ice sheet pass irreversible tipping points.

The Earth system is breaking down now with breathtaking speed. And climate scientists have faced an even more insurmountable public communication task than the astronomers in Don't Look Up, since climate destruction unfolds over decades - lightning fast as far as the planet is concerned, but glacially slow as far as the news cycle is concerned - and isn't as immediate and visible as a comet in the sky.

Given all this, dismissing Don't Look Up as too obvious might say more about the critic than the film. It's funny and terrifying because it conveys a certain cold truth that climate scientists and others who understand the full depth of the climate emergency are living every day. I hope that this movie, which comically depicts how hard it is to break through prevailing norms, actually helps break through those norms in real life.

We need stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from knowing what's coming while failing to act

I also hope Hollywood is learning how to tell climate stories that matter. Instead of stories that create comforting distance from the grave danger we are in via unrealistic techno fixes for unrealistic disaster scenarios, humanity needs stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from collectively knowing what's coming while collectively failing to act.

We also need stories that show humanity responding rationally to the crisis. A lack of technology isn't what's blocking action. Instead, humanity needs to confront the fossil fuel industry head on, accept that we need to consume less energy, and switch into full-on emergency mode. The sense of solidarity and relief we'd feel once this happens - if it happens - would be gamechanging for our species. More and better facts will not catalyze this sociocultural tipping point, but more and better stories might.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
I'm a climate scientist. Don't Look Up captures the madness I see every day | Peter Kalmus

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
he movie Don't Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it's also the most accurate film about society's terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I've seen.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Recode interview, which explores the claim made by a group of biologists and ecologists that social media is threatening humanity. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Recode interview, which explores the claim made by a group of biologists and ecologists that social media is threatening humanity. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why is Joe Bak-Coleman and the other authors of the paper so worried about what’s happening? Then think about their suggestion of treating social media as a ‘crisis discipline’. What does this mean, and how does it shift our understanding of social media? What are the challenges of exploring the effects of social media? Are they right about its risks? Finally, what do students think are our individual and collective responsibilities as knowers when it comes to using social media?

KEY TERMS Crisis discipline, Information ecosystem

# data[].attributes.headline
This Guardian interview with Katharine Hayhoe discusses the nature of scientific knowledge, and why people are skeptical of the work of climate scientists. 

# data[].attributes.subject
This Guardian interview with Katharine Hayhoe discusses the nature of scientific knowledge, and why people are skeptical of the work of climate scientists. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE Hayhoe’s key point is that 'A thermometer is not liberal or conservative'. What do students think she means by that, and is it always true? Secondly, why does Hayhoe believe many people are unwilling to accept the idea that human activity is the reason for the changes in the earth’s climate? Assuming she’s right, how can this be resolved?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She has contributed to more than 125 scientific papers and won numerous prizes for her science communication work. In 2018 she was a contributor to the US National Climate Assessment and was awarded the Stephen H Schneider award for outstanding climate science communication.

In 2018, we have seen forest fires in the Arctic circle; record high temperatures in parts of Australia, Africa and the US; floods in India; and devastating droughts in South Africa and Argentina. Is this a turning point?
This year has hit home how climate change loads the dice against us by taking naturally occurring weather events and amplifying them. We now have attribution studies that show how much more likely or stronger extreme weather events have become as a result of human emissions. For example, wildfires in the western US now burn nearly twice the area they would without climate change, and almost 40% more rain fell during Hurricane Harvey than would have otherwise. So we are really feeling the impacts and know how much humanity is responsible.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 1.5C report in October. A month later, the US federal government's climate assessment - to which you contribut ed - came out. How did these two massive studies move our understanding along?
These assessments are important because there is a Schrödinger's Cat element to studying climate impacts. The act of observing affects the outcome. If people aren't aware of what is happening, why would anyone change? Assessments like these provide us with a vision of the future if we continue on our current pathway, and by doing so they address the most widespread and dangerous myth that the largest number of us have bought into: not that the science isn't real, but rather that climate change doesn't matter to me personally.

Compared to past studies, how much media attention did these reports receive?
There was significant coverage but a lot of media survive by generating controversy so they bring on opposing voices rather than explaining the scientific facts. Climate change shouldn't be fodder for commentators who represent the interests of the fossil fuel industry by muddying the science. As a human and a scientist, this focus on controversy is frustrating. A thermometer is not liberal or conservative.

Fossil fuels have brought us many benefits ... but the solution to our current crisis is to stop using them. That is scary

Are there any signs that public opinion is shifting in the US and elsewhere?
We haven't yet reached the tipping point to motivate sufficient action. But there has been a change. Ten years ago, few people felt personally affected by climate change. It seemed very distant. Today, most people can point to a specific way climate affects their daily lives. This is important because the three key steps to action are accepting that climate change is real, recognising it affects us, and being motivated to do something to fix it. Opinion polls in the US show 70% of people agree the climate is changing, but a majority still say it won't affect them.

Trump was dismissive of these reports and has repeatedly tried to deny any link between climate change and extreme weather. What are the politics behind this denial?
It's a vicious cycle. The more doom-filled reports the scientists release, the stronger the pushback from politicians whose power, ideology and funding depends on maintaining the status quo, and who are supported by those who fear the solutions to climate change more than they fear its impacts. Opposition to climate change is a symptom of a society that is politically polarised between those who cling to the past and those who recognise the need for a better future. Fossil fuels have brought us many benefits - and I'm grateful for their contribution to my life - but the solution to our current crisis is to stop using them. That change can be scary, especially for those with most to lose financially from this shift. If you feel threatened, the instinctive reaction is to push back.

Progress of sorts was made at the UN climate talks in Poland, though many scientists say global society is not moving fast enough. What is your take?
Progress was made in Poland as the world agreed on a rule book to implement the Paris agreement. The agreement is like a global pot luck in which every nation brings something different to the party. For some it's soil conservation, for another wind power or carbon pricing. Poland gave us an agreed common standard on how to measure these contributions. That was progress. As scientists, we are like physicians for the planet who have been monitoring its rising fever for 80 years. We know that our lifestyle, specifically our dependence on fossil fuels is the cause of a problem that is rapidly becoming serious and in some cases even dangerous. So when we see the world dragging its heels and carbon emissions continuing to grow, we become concerned, anxious, and even frustrated. We know we aren't changing fast enough.

On current trends, if you had to give a percentage breakdown of the likelihood of the following three outcomes by 2100, what would you give: a) keeping to 1.5C; b) keeping to 2C; c) rising above 3C; and d) overshooting 4C?
I'd put my money on a gradual bend away from a higher scenario, which is where we are now, until accumulating and worsening climate disasters eventually lead to a collective "oh shit!" moment, when people finally realise climate impacts do pose a far greater threat than the solutions. At that point, I would hope the world would suddenly ramp up its carbon reduction to the scale of a Manhattan Project or a moon race and we would finally be able to make serious progress. The multitrillion-dollar question is simply when that tipping point in opinion will come, and whether it will be too late for civilisation as we know it. I hope with all my heart that we stay under 1.5C, but my cynical brain says 3C. Perhaps the reality will be somewhere between my head and my heart at 2C.

Extinction Rebellion marching with other groups through London in December last year. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock

What is the best way out of the climate crisis? What policies would make a difference?
The most important thing is to accelerate the realisation that we have to act. This means connecting the dots to show that the impacts are not distant any more: they are here and they affect our lives. It also means talking about solutions. The technology and knowledge are there. The economics already make sense. In Texas, where I live, the biggest military base, Fort Hood, switched last year to renewables because they were cheaper than natural gas. And finally, it means weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, which is challenged by the fact that the majority of the world's richest companies have made their money from the fossil fuel economy - so the majority of the wealth and power remains in their hands.

Are there any climate engineering schemes or trials that have potential?
One solution being discussed is the idea of deliberately geoengineering the planet to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and/or cool the planet. I believe it is important to discuss and study these technologies very thoroughly, because implementing some of them, like solar radiation management [spraying particles into the air to simulate a volcanic eruption and block some of the sunlight reaching Earth], is extremely risky. It would be like giving an experimental drug to every human on the planet before it had been tested. I'm more hopeful about smaller scale, less risky geoengineering projects that suck carbon dioxide out of the air, such as those being trialled by Climeworks to turn carbon into stone or fuel: or even massive tree-planting efforts, as in Bhutan.

What's the role of global finance? Can money managers, shareholders and multinationals exert pressure and take positive action in ways that short-termist, vote-hungry politicians seem unable to do?
Yes! In the world we live in, money speaks loudly. Thanks to the growing divestment movement, we have seen cities, universities and entire countries, in the case of Ireland, withdrawing investments from fossil fuel assets. This isn't only happening for ethical reasons but for practical ones as well. As clean energy continues to expand, those assets could become stranded. When money talks the world listens.

Firefighters watch as flames climb a hillside in Guinda, California, July last year. Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

What are the most positive developments you have seen in the past year in the climate field?
I'm asked what gives me hope on a daily basis, and my answer is, I don't find hope in my science, I find it in people. Over the last few years, the number of people who want to talk about and do something about climate has increased exponentially. Then, there is the unexpected leadership of organisations such as Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, RepublicEN, the Iron and Earth group - young professionals in the oil and construction industries who want to be part of the move from fossil fuels; and the take-up of renewables even in conservative states like Texas, which now gets 20% of its energy from wind and solar power.

Finally, there's the encouraging news such as solar being the fastest-growing power source around the world, clean energy jobs growing from India to the US, and new technology being developed every year that drops the price and increases the accessibility of fossil fuel alternatives.

This year has also seen the rise of disruptive campaigning, for example Extinction Rebellion in the UK; the student strikes led by ; and direct action in the US and Canada against oil pipelines. Is there a point when scientists also have to speak out more forcefully?
We are moving in that direction. Scientists are not just disembodied brains floating in a glass jar, we are humans who want the same thing every other human wants, a safe place to live on this planet we call home. So while our work must continue to be unbiased and objective, increasingly we are raising our voices, adding to the clear message that climate change is real and humans are responsible, the impacts are serious and we must act now, if we want to avoid the worst of them.

What are the key political moments in 2019 for climate policy in the US and the world?
International talks are important but we should be looking at subnational actors because there is a lot going on at the city and corporate level. Across the US a hundred cities have committed to going 100% clean energy. Companies like Apple have already achieved that goal. In the US there's a new climate bill with bipartisan sponsors, which is essential for legislation to succeed long-term.

Are we likely to get any respite from climate change?
(Sighs.) Climate change is a long-term trend superimposed over natural variability. There'll be good and bad years, just like there are for a patient with a long-term illness, but it isn't going away. To stabilise climate change, we have to eliminate our carbon emissions. And we're still a long way away from that.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Katharine Hayhoe: 'A thermometer is not liberal or conservative'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She has contributed to more than 125 scientific papers and won numerous prizes for her science communication work. In 2018 she was a contributor to the US National Climate Assessment and was awarded the Stephen H Schneider award for outstanding climate science communication.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Wired article, exploring how a new approach to gathering data may fundamentally change the way we understand and deal with climate change. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Wired article, exploring how a new approach to gathering data may fundamentally change the way we understand and deal with climate change. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE How is the ICOS doing things differently? Why is this so important? Will it manage to convince those who are determined to deny that climate change is either not being worsened by human actions, or is not an issue of importance - in other words, is reliable data enough?

KEY TERMS Reliable data, Solidarity, Internationalism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Whatever the data reveals, Kutsch hopes that the current crisis will help governments view climate change differently. He points to South Korea as an example of a country that took scientists seriously and managed to avoid a catastrophic coronavirus death toll. Once life returns to normal, Kutsch hopes that globally we will all pay more attention to scientists in general.

"I think this is a learning experience," he says. "Scientists were facing a lot of denial and negative comments in the past, then suddenly we learned from the corona crisis that it is definitely helpful to listen to scientists. I hope this learning experience will last when we're starting to talk about climate change again."

He hopes too that this period of slowed-down living will instil lessons of how to move forward. "Perhaps people have learned that not every face to face meeting is necessary and that you can use virtual tools," he says. "Perhaps behaviour may change, people may learn that it pays to take care of each other. It might be that people find some kind of solidarity between generations, people and countries. In the end, I hope it will improve and strengthen internationalism; in the long run we'll have to co-operate internationally."

More great stories from WIRED
🚚 The French town that created its own Amazon 🦆 Google got rich from your data. DuckDuckGo is fighting back 😷 Which face mask should you buy? The WIRED guide 🔊 Listen to The WIRED Podcast, the week in science, technology and culture, delivered every Friday 👉 Follow WIRED on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Science has a new tool in the fight against climate change: good data

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Whatever the data reveals, Kutsch hopes that the current crisis will help governments view climate change differently. He points to South Korea as an example of a country that took scientists seriously and managed to avoid a catastrophic coronavirus death toll.

# data[].attributes.headline
An Atlantic article, arguing that the labelling of an entire geological epoch as the ‘Anthropocene’ is invalid. 

# data[].attributes.subject
An Atlantic article, arguing that the labelling of an entire geological epoch as the ‘Anthropocene’ is invalid. 

# data[].attributes.body
UNPACKING THE SOURCE Get students to look at the reasons for and against this point of view, and think about the consequences of applying this label in terms of how we understand the world. Ultimately, is the article right in contending that the Anthropocene term serves to “inflate humanity’s legacy”?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch.