Optimistic Realism

I like to think of myself as an “optimistic realist”.

Like - I’ll always be very real with you when I’m answering your questions, but I’ll also insist that there’s always hope. Because there is.

The situation’s pretty damn scary sometimes. I’ll be the first to admit that.

But if you look back to this time 2 years ago, was anyone really talking about climate change? How many times had you heard the term “climate action”? How about “climate emergency”?

In only about a year and a half, we’ve revolutionised discussion around the topic of climate change. It’s gone from something you might hear about once or twice in science class, or something you hear about once on the news and then forget about, to something that almost everyone knows about.

Everyone’s talking about it. Millions of people are calling for action. People are starting to consider climate action when voting. People are starting to change their lives for the environment. And that’s such a great thing.

Now, all we need is to move away from talk and onto tangible action. And, even though it’s not happening yet, it can still be done, both at an individual and governmental level, and under the right leadership.

Some may say it’s a lost cause. Some may give up along the way. But would millions of people - activists, local authorities, regional governments, scientists in the field, the United Nations - really be calling for action if the situation really was hopeless? Of course not. So let’s keep listening to the scientists’ calls for emergency action, and let’s act on them.

As I said, I’ll always be realistic with you guys. And I believe I have been - I will always try to be as scientifically accurate as possible in all my posts. And realistically speaking, it’s a worrying situation. Not quite “we’re all gonna die” worrying, but still pretty bad. 

But it’s not realistic to say we’re already doomed, because scientifically speaking, we’re not. So, as hard as it can be sometimes, it’s important that we don’t give up hope. Because when we give up hope, we give up on action, and we give up on our planet.

“Being part of a group of scientists, from every corner of the world, working together to trying to avert disaster at this critical moment in human history, changed my life. It taught me that when we align behind a collective vision guided by strong leadership – no matter how unsurmountable the challenges feel – anything is possible.

Ultimately, we only really have one choice to make – to stay connected with people that restore our faith in the goodness of humanity, or fall into an abyss of cynicism and despair. It really is as simple as that. You can choose to be a person that restores someone else’s faith in humanity, and do what you can where you can, even when all feels lost.”

-Dr Joëlle Gergis (award winning climate scientist involved in the latest IPCC report)

“Cynicism serves no purpose but to uphold the status quo.” -John Paul Mejia

This article is definitely worth a read. The main points are:

1) Do what you can to reduce your own carbon footprint, but don’t invest all your effort there or rack yourself with guilt if you aren’t in a position to make big lifestyle changes. Focus on the bigger picture (i.e. political, societal, and community changes).

2) Act communally. There is power in numbers. Find an organization that aligns with what you want to achieve and get involved (this could look like donating money, volunteering, etc.). 

3) This is an ongoing, long-term issue. Pace yourself and try not to get overwhelmed with frustration if it takes time for your effort to pay off. Sustainable climate action is better than burning yourself out trying to do too much at once and then losing motivation.

4) Make space for both grief and joy. Sometimes you need to make a conscious effort to celebrate the progress that has been made so far and appreciate all the good things that still exist here and now. Honor the grief and fear you have for the future without letting it completely overwhelm your life.

Farmers in Senegal Plant Drought-Resistant, Circular Gardens

We have to fight for what’s left at the very least! And I’m not trying to be overly optimistic but Mother Nature is amazing she just might heal more then we think she will

“Cynicism serves no purpose but to uphold the status quo.” -John Paul Mejia

This article is definitely worth a read. The main points are:

1) Do what you can to reduce your own carbon footprint, but don’t invest all your effort there or rack yourself with guilt if you aren’t in a position to make big lifestyle changes. Focus on the bigger picture (i.e. political, societal, and community changes).

2) Act communally. There is power in numbers. Find an organization that aligns with what you want to achieve and get involved (this could look like donating money, volunteering, etc.). 

3) This is an ongoing, long-term issue. Pace yourself and try not to get overwhelmed with frustration if it takes time for your effort to pay off. Sustainable climate action is better than burning yourself out trying to do too much at once and then losing motivation.

4) Make space for both grief and joy. Sometimes you need to make a conscious effort to celebrate the progress that has been made so far and appreciate all the good things that still exist here and now. Honor the grief and fear you have for the future without letting it completely overwhelm your life.

OK, the report's out.

If you'd like to, please read through it. I'd recommend reading through the Headline Statements PDF - it's short, accessible and informative, and for some reason I can't access the Summary for Policymakers PDF, and that's 39 pages long anyway.

Some key takeaways from the PDF:

- It is now very likely that 1.5 degrees C will be exceeded without extremely strong reductions in greenhouse gases over the next few decades. This is a much stronger warning than before, and it should be a major wake-up call for the world.

Remember, though, that 1.5 degrees C is not a 'hard limit'. We will not suddenly be doomed at 1.5 degrees. What it does mean, though, is that a certain degree of climate change may now be locked in. That doesn't mean all climate change is now unavoidable - it means that the world has to work extremely hard to keep warming below 1.5 degrees, or below 2 degrees if we do not do that.

Climate change isn't a cliff that we fall off after a specific number of years or a specific amount of warming. It's a slope we slide down. Every tenth of a degree of warming makes the situation more dangerous, and every tenth of a degree avoided means more lives saved.

- Many climate changes that have already happened, including current sea level rise and the state of ice sheets, are irreversible on a time scale of centuries to millennia.

We will not be able to actually reverse these climate impacts, but that doesn't mean we can't stop more from happening. There are some things that we will be able to mitigate, and some that are already here and we will have to adapt our societies to.

And even if climate change impacts are already here, they can and will still get worse without the right action. How much worse they get is still in our hands.

- ECS (equilibrium climate sensitivity, aka how much the planet is expected to warm by 2100 under current emissions scenarios) is around 3 degrees C, but unlikely scenarios are still important to take into account.

We're at aeound 1.2 degrees already, and you can see what's happening. 3 degrees will be catastrophic, and more than 3 degrees will be even more catastrophic. But this is under our business as usual scenario - this isn't locked in, and we still have to limit warming as much as possible.

There is also the slight possibility that ECS may be higher than expected, or that climate impacts may be more severe than expected due to tipping points such as ice sheet collapse and changes in the ocean's circulation.

These are described in the report as "low likelihood outcomes", but with something as serious as this, these are part of risk assessment, and they cannot and should not be ruled out.

- There really isn't anything new here. If you've been following climate news, you will probably already know all of this. As I said yesterday, the IPCC reports are an aggregation of research. They present huge amounts of recent climate research together, and compile it all int o one report that represents the IPCC's scientific consensus.

This is mostly stuff that has already made the news, or that we already know. We know 1.5 degrees C isn't going to be easy. We know that dangerous climate change is here and now, and that we're not going to be able to reverse climate impacts, and that we don't really know what's going to happen next in the Earth's climate system.

But that doean't mean that all climate change is now inevitable, and it definitely doesn't change what we really need to do: cut greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible, and as much as possible.

Thank you for reading this. Stay strong and take care of yourselves. 💚

Thanks for all of your tags and comments on my recent IPCC report post. I've seen a lot of people talking about how much it's helped them, and saying that it's what they needed.

I'm glad it helped, and I hope it eased your anxieties a little, helped you understand the science, and helped you know what to look out for in the media.

It's gonna be difficult today, so please take good care of yourselves. Try not to doomscroll on social media too much, and take a break if you need to. I think I will.

Stay safe and stay strong, people. I wish you all the best. 💚

The Next IPCC Report: A Few Words

Hi people. I hope you’re all doing well.

So tomorrow, the next IPCC climate report (IPCC Assessment Report 6, Working Group I) will come out at around 10am CEST. It is expected to be an incredibly strong warning about the climate crisis, with a lot of alarming language. And most news sites will likely talk about this report in one way or another.

It is, of course, your choice whether or not you read this report, or whether or not you read the summaries that will be on news sites tomorrow. I will be doing so, and I suggest that you do as well, but only if you are in the right frame of mind to engage with what could be a lot of bad climate news.

If you do choose to read the report and/or the summaries in the news, or go on social media to talk about it or read about it, here are a few heads-up.

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1) The news headlines about this report may be misleading. Do you remember when the last IPCC report came out in 2018? It told us that we had around 12 years (at that point) to halve global emissions if we wanted to limit warming to below 1.5 degrees C.

The media, and especially people on social media, focused so heavily on the ‘12 years’ figure that a lot of people - especially a lot of young people - thought that the IPCC had said that there were only 12 years left until the literal end of the world, or that we would all die if we went over 1.5 degrees. None of which is actually true.

I worry that the media, as well as social media, will do the same with this report. They’ll take one part of the report, and use it as a frightening headline in order to catch people’s eyes and make them panic.

And sometimes this works. Sometimes fear can be used to mobilise people. But don’t forget who these headlines are intended to scare: people who aren’t aware of the climate emergency yet. If you’ve been paying attention to the climate crisis, you know what’s going on, and you’re likely already dealing with climate anxiety. These headlines are not for you.

I read this article about the IPCC report today, and I immediately wanted to share it on here, so there it is. Please read it -  I’m sure some of you will find it useful.

Here are some quotes from the article that stood out to me:

Please keep these in mind tomorrow. I certainly will do - they’re good advice. It might be hard, but please take steps to take care of your mental health. Basically, stay safe and stay sane - or at least try to. Don’t ignore or forget about the climate emergency, but take some time to yourself, and try not to let yourself get swallowed by your own (or other people’s) fear and despair.

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2) Social media will likely be full of misinformation about the report. I’ve talked about ‘climate doomers’ before on here, and if you’ve been following me for a while, you know how I feel about them.

After the release of this report, there is going to be a lot of climate doomism on social media. There will be people on social media - people outside of the scientific community - who insist that this IPCC report means that it’s too late to do anything about the climate crisis, or that any sort of action is futile, or that we just have to accept our fate and go quietly.

Please do not listen to these people. The IPCC reports do not say ‘it’s too late’ - they say the opposite, as do the vast majority of climate scientists. We do not have to ‘give up’ or ‘accept our fate’; what we do still matters, and it will always matter.

Some of these people will tell you that the IPCC is “too conservative” (i.e. underestimates climate change), and therefore cannot be trusted. Therefore, they follow outsider ‘scientists’ (whose predictions are often much more wrong than those of the IPCC), and use their research as ‘evidence’ that we’re doomed. 

(Again, these people are wrong, and this is basically the anti-vaxxer and climate denier level of science.)

While the IPCC has sometimes underestimated some impacts of climate change, i.e. past sea level rise, impacts have still generally been within their expected range, and not wildly outside of it. Also, scientific models and predictions are never 100% accurate - there is always a margin of error.

I will repeat myself: our house is on fire, not burned to ashes. We won’t be able to save everything, but we still have to work to save everything and everyone that we can. What climate doomers want us all to do is to just stand there in the burning house and quietly await the end without even trying to save ourselves and everything else. That doesn’t make sense to me, and in terms of the climate crisis, it’s a massive abdication of responsibility.

Please think critically about what you read on social media about this. If you need to, take a break from social media. Even without the doomism, there will likely be a lot of grief and fear and anger on social media tomorrow - if this will affect your mental health, please step away from it.

Don’t forget that no matter what you read, and no matter what anyone on social media tells you, the vast majority of climate scientists will agree with these things: it’s real, it’s bad, but it’s not over.

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3) Nothing in this report should be particularly new to us. As I’ve said before: if you’ve been paying attention, what is in tomorrow’s report should not be new to you. The IPCC reports are basically aggregations of thousands of different research papers about different aspects of the climate emergency, including its impacts.

If you follow climate news on a regular basis, you should already know about these impacts, as well as what could be coming if we don’t do the right thing. As scary as all of this together may be, none of this is new to us.

I may be wrong about this. Maybe there will be something in the report that comes as a surprise to some of us, like another ‘deadline’, a tipping point we’ve reached, or some research that didn’t make the news. Be prepared for that possibility. But as it stands right now, most if not all of this stuff should already be known to us.

And again, no matter what comes up in the report, what we have to do remains the same: cut greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

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4) The report will probably be extremely worrying and contain a lot of bad news, and that’s a good thing in a way. Back in 2018, when the last report was released, we were warned that we did not have a lot of time left to keep warming below 1.5 degrees C.

After that, what did we see? We saw Extinction Rebellion’s civil disobedience movement. We saw Greta Thunberg’s school strike movement. We saw millions of people, all over the world, waking up to the climate emergency, and making it clear that we wouldn’t go down without a fight. We saw a huge increase in climate activism, both on the streets and online, because people started to realise what was at stake and what we had to do to ensure a safe future for human civilisation. More people were talking about the climate emergency than ever before.

And this next IPCC report is expected to be an even stronger warning than the last. Is it going to be scary? Probably. But as I’ve said before, a healthy level of fear is sometimes useful, especially in a crisis. If people read this report or see it being talked about in the news, become aware of what is happening to this planet, and then are able to channel their fear and anger and grief into action, then that is a very good thing.

In this situation, knowledge is power. We can’t fight the climate crisis if most people do not know about the climate crisis. If this report creates a collective knowledge of the climate crisis within society, then hopefully that knowledge will one day become our power.

And we need kindness as well - we need to be there for each other through all of this, and we need people, especially young people who have just become aware of the climate emergency, to know that their worries are justified, but that they will not be alone through all of this. We can’t just terrify people with bad news and leave them on their own with their fear, we have to provide them with resources and support as well.

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I will leave you with all of this, and I will pin this post so everyone can see it. If you’re going to read the report tomorrow, please stay safe, stay sane, take care of yourself, and keep all of this in mind.

And always remember: we don’t yet know what is going to happen next, and anyone who tells you that they know the future is lying to you. We know that we can’t save everything, but all isn’t lost either. There is still joy in the world, and there are lots of beautiful things and wonderful people on our planet, and all of them deserve a safe future.

Take care, people. Have a great day. 💚

@climatesupport did a great job of articulating this.

Please stay safe tomorrow and if you need to take a break from the news and social media until the meant-to-stir-up-fear headlines die down then take this as your permission to do so.

Remember to stay focused on working on the things you can control.

No matter the odds, hope is the only way forward.

Climate Thoughts of the Day: No, This Is Not "The End"

Hi everyone, I hope you're all well.

Recently, I've been getting a lot of asks from people who are concerned about various climate and environmental disasters around the world.

Let me just say: you are absolutely right to be concerned and scared. I'm concerned and scared - that's why I engage in climate activism, and that's why I run this blog. There are a lot of terrible things happening around the world, and a lot of people are dying unnecessarily because of these disasters.

Because of this, a lot of people - perhaps understandably - look at what is happening around the world in terms of the climate emergency, and tell themselves that these disasters spell "the end" for the world, or for humanity or human society. A lot of people think that these disasters are only the beginning of a global crisis which will one day inevitably end the world.

This crisis that we are in is extremely serious. It is deadly for many people, and we are still not at the stage where the action we need to see is being taken. And some degree of climate change is already, unfortunately, locked in.

But, with all of this in mind, "the end" is not here.

Since the beginning of human society, and even before, we have always had to experience environmental disasters. Climate change is now making those disasters more frequent and more severe. That is the truth.

But these disasters, however serious and deadly they are, are not "the end". Singular events, or events in one or a few countries, do not mean that the end of the world is here. And they certainly do not mean that we have to give up on climate and environmental action - if anything, to save more lives and protect more people, they mean that we must fight harder for climate and environmental justice, and think and act with the future in mind.

I always like to think of this crisis as a house on fire. If your house is on fire, would you just sit and watch it all burn? Or would you try your absolute best to save everything you possibly can? Even if it's too late to save *everything* in your house, you still have to give it everything you've got, otherwise you'll be left with nothing.

Instead of seeing these disasters as "the end", we need to treat this crisis like a house on fire - that is, we have to look at ways to both mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. In the future, we may have to build our societies with the climate crisis in mind - that means building houses, buildings and infrastructure with increased flood defences, or on higher ground, for example. We will also have to continue to work towards decarbonisation and move away from fossil fuels worldwide - this is something that must be done, and soon.

Please, if you're reading this, do not give up on the future or assume that the end of the world is already here. The planet is not going to be fixed or saved, nor are potentially millions of lives going to be saved, by fatalism or a "let's all just party until the apocalypse" mentality - the future needs the skills and the empathy and the hope and, indeed, the well-directed fear of climate-concerned and climate-aware people.

This isn't the end. Not yet. Not for the planet, or for humans, or for you. Keep your head up, stay strong, and think about ways in which you can one day use your skills, whatever they may be, to help to create a better future or to raise awareness of the climate crisis.

I hope you all have a great day. 💚

Climate catastrophe is not inevitable.

Societal collapse is not inevitable.

Species extinction is not inevitable.

None of the future climate effects you hear about on the news are inevitable.

The future of this planet is not set in stone. People have power. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, and keep moving forwards.

Climate change doesn't mean there won't be a future. It just means we have a lot of work to do.