Name: We’re not doomed by climate change. We’re just confused. | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2025-11-19T17:01:43.000Z
Duration: 47 min 56 s
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I'm Sean, host of the gray area for the show this week.

She's a very interesting data scientist who happens to have a new book out called Clearing the Air.

If you like, me and almost everyone else are awash in climate doomerism.

She has a really encouraging, hopeful, optimistic story to tell about the world and the direction we're heading and why there are actually a whole lot of reasons to feel good about the future.

Well, you have spent a lot of your time looking at cold, hard data and somehow, miraculously, you've come out of that experience more hopeful, not less.

What changed your mind about the path we're on?

The focus of my work is often on environmental problems and climate change in particular.

And I think before we even zoom in on the climate problem, I think one thing you get from looking at data, and

specifically data over long timescales, right, so not day to day or week to week or even year to year, but, you know, how have things changed over decades or centuries?

What you tend to find when you zoom out is that we've made humans have made amazing progress in many ways.

Actually, if you look at almost any kind of human development indicator, whether it's poverty or hunger or child mortality or saving mothers or life expectancy, the list goes on.

We've made huge improvements over the last few centuries and in particular over the last 50 years.

It's often hard to get that perspective just following the day to day coverage of stuff or what people are speaking about happened in the last hour.

We are capable of, of solving problems and making progress.

And then I think specifically on the environment and climate, you know, we're still in a very bad position on that.

You know, we progress has been too slow, but we have made progress in many different ways.

And I think some of the very clear data there is on stuff like the price of renewables or the price of batteries and how competitive they are, or actually now how quickly we are deploying this stuff, which again, you just can only see through the data.

You know, you're just not going to get that in a daily news headline.

You need to step back and look at the data to understand the scale of what's happening on these solutions.

I do often feel like we are kind of toggling between dueling climate stories, there's either a story about denial or a story about despair and not much in between, present company excluded.

Do you think we're just naturally attracted to extremes?

Because maybe in some ways that's just a simpler, neater way to look at the world?

I think we're often more fine tuned, I think, to be pessimistic about the world in general.

And I think there's some ingrained psychology in that in the past it's definitely more advantageous to think about what's the next problem that's coming rather than saying, oh, how good we're doing.

So I think there's that psychological part and then I think most people get their information from the news or from social media and I think the reality is that often nuanced stories just don't do well in the media.

Often it is one extreme or the other that gets the attention.

And if you are, that's where you're getting your news on what's happening on climate or any other issue, then I think you are mostly seeing the extremes in one or the other direction.

As you say, either this climate's not a problem, we're doing fine, or the opposite, the world's going to collapse tomorrow and we're all doomed.

And I've spoken to journalists in the past about this and their response has often been, well, we want to produce the more nuanced stories that don't have the really clickbaity extreme headline.

But then no one reads them and no one clicks on them.

So I think there is this unfortunate dynamic between the people producing content and, and

also us as consumers of content that we are drawn more to these kind of interesting extremes rather than the kind of nuanced middle.

Yeah, I don't know how wild the marketing people were here when we came up with the name the gray area.

We think we're going to lean into the nuance.

that doesn't mean it's the wrong way to look at things.

I don't know, have you always been pretty level headed when it comes to this stuff, even before you dove into the data?

I've changed a lot on this in the last decade or 15 years where now I'm framed as the kind of optimistic person on climate.

But you know, 15 years ago I was very pessimistic.

I was very, very much in the world doomed because of climate change.

And there's Just no way we're going to solve this.

As a young person, I won't really have a kind of livable planet to grow up in.

So, no, it's definitely not been hardwired.

I mean, I think this has been kind of taught and a lot of it has come from stepping back to look at the data.

And that has actually rapidly shifted my perspective on this.

Yeah, I think I'm about 15 years behind you.

I think you say pretty early in the book, the question you get the most from people is are we doomed?

I think what people are really asking when they ask that is whether anything we do, innovation, growth, building, really makes a difference.

How do you think about our agency at this stage of the crisis?

How much of a difference can we still make?

So if you look at any of the kind of future pathways, the range of possible climate futures, the trajectory that we take, the final temperature rise that we end up, I think people have a sense that there is often some single threshold in the system that once we pass that it's over, there's nothing we can do to stop this.

This is generally not how climate impacts work.

What's really clear is that the higher the warming, the higher the impacts, right?

So going from 1.5 to 1.6 to 1.7 to 1 point, all of those incremental increases in global temperatures make a difference to the impacts.

So I think people have this sense of if we're past 1.5, we're done, we're doome.

Or if we're past 2 degrees, you know, we're done, we're doomed.

Even if we're past 1.5, pursuing 1.6 or 1.7, these all make a difference to the final climate outcomes that we will have to deal with.

So it's always worth making the effort to reduce those, those potential dangers and hazards as much as we, as much as we can.

Another question I get a lot is, you know, as individuals, do we have any agency in this?

And here I often hear kind of polar opposite arguments where some people are all about individual behavior change, right?

This notion that, you know, if we all just do a little, you know, we'll fix this.

You know, it's not the case that if we all, as individuals do something, we'll fix the skew global problem.

But you also get the other extreme that says, you know, individuals don't matter.

So it's only on governments and businesses and economic systems to change this.

What's really key is that governments, companies, investors, etc.

They play a huge role in making the alternatives to the drivers of climate change.

So fossil fuels, for example, they play a huge role in making good decisions on what energy sources we build, what products are available.

So, you know, an electric vehicle versus a petrol vehicle or public transport, they play a huge role in making that available, making that easy for people to switch, and

making it cost effective or affordable for people to switch, they play a huge role in that.

But as individuals, you know, if they put in that effort as individuals, we can't sit in our hands and say, no, we're not going to move from the petrol car to electric vehicle or we're not going to shift to a more plant based diet.

As individuals, we play a key role in driving the systemic changes that are needed.

One thing that really comes through in your work is that the world is actually improving faster than we think, than most people think.

And yet, for some of the reasons you've already mentioned, the public mood still feels pretty grim.

But there is, however, a chart early in the book that shows that most people underestimate how much others care about climate action, even in the US.

And I confess that I've probably said many times on this very show that most Americans don't care enough about this issue.

And that's a massive political problem for people who do.

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We’re not doomed by climate change. We’re just confused. | The Gray Area

stuff

perspective

majority

progress