global warming narrative essay

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Essay on Global Warming

Updated on
Apr 27, 2024

Being able to write an essay is an integral part of mastering any language. Essays form an integral part of many academic and scholastic exams like the SAT, and UPSC amongst many others. It is a crucial evaluative part of English proficiency tests as well like IELTS, TOEFL, etc. Major essays are meant to emphasize public issues of concern that can have significant consequences on the world. To understand the concept of Global Warming and its causes and effects, we must first examine the many factors that influence the planet’s temperature and what this implies for the world’s future. Here’s an unbiased look at the essay on Global Warming and other essential related topics.

Short Essay on Global Warming and Climate Change?

Since the industrial and scientific revolutions, Earth’s resources have been gradually depleted. Furthermore, the start of the world’s population’s exponential expansion is particularly hard on the environment. Simply put, as the population’s need for consumption grows, so does the use of natural resources , as well as the waste generated by that consumption.

Climate change has been one of the most significant long-term consequences of this. Climate change is more than just the rise or fall of global temperatures; it also affects rain cycles, wind patterns, cyclone frequencies, sea levels, and other factors. It has an impact on all major life groupings on the planet.

What is Global Warming?

Global warming is the unusually rapid increase in Earth’s average surface temperature over the past century, primarily due to the greenhouse gases released by people burning fossil fuels . The greenhouse gases consist of methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, carbon dioxide, water vapour, and chlorofluorocarbons. The weather prediction has been becoming more complex with every passing year, with seasons more indistinguishable, and the general temperatures hotter.

The number of hurricanes, cyclones, droughts, floods, etc., has risen steadily since the onset of the 21st century. The supervillain behind all these changes is Global Warming. The name is quite self-explanatory; it means the rise in the temperature of the Earth.

What are the Causes of Global Warming?

According to recent studies, many scientists believe the following are the primary four causes of global warming:

Deforestation
Greenhouse emissions
Carbon emissions per capita

Extreme global warming is causing natural disasters , which can be seen all around us. One of the causes of global warming is the extreme release of greenhouse gases that become trapped on the earth’s surface, causing the temperature to rise. Similarly, volcanoes contribute to global warming by spewing excessive CO2 into the atmosphere.

The increase in population is one of the major causes of Global Warming. This increase in population also leads to increased air pollution . Automobiles emit a lot of CO2, which remains in the atmosphere. This increase in population is also causing deforestation, which contributes to global warming.

The earth’s surface emits energy into the atmosphere in the form of heat, keeping the balance with the incoming energy. Global warming depletes the ozone layer, bringing about the end of the world. There is a clear indication that increased global warming will result in the extinction of all life on Earth’s surface.

Also Read: Land, Soil, Water, Natural Vegetation, and Wildlife Resources

Solutions for Global Warming

Of course, industries and multinational conglomerates emit more carbon than the average citizen. Nonetheless, activism and community effort are the only viable ways to slow the worsening effects of global warming. Furthermore, at the state or government level, world leaders must develop concrete plans and step-by-step programmes to ensure that no further harm is done to the environment in general.

Although we are almost too late to slow the rate of global warming, finding the right solution is critical. Everyone, from individuals to governments, must work together to find a solution to Global Warming. Some of the factors to consider are pollution control, population growth, and the use of natural resources.

One very important contribution you can make is to reduce your use of plastic. Plastic is the primary cause of global warming, and recycling it takes years. Another factor to consider is deforestation, which will aid in the control of global warming. More tree planting should be encouraged to green the environment. Certain rules should also govern industrialization. Building industries in green zones that affect plants and species should be prohibited.

Effects of Global Warming

Global warming is a real problem that many people want to disprove to gain political advantage. However, as global citizens, we must ensure that only the truth is presented in the media.

This decade has seen a significant impact from global warming. The two most common phenomena observed are glacier retreat and arctic shrinkage. Glaciers are rapidly melting. These are clear manifestations of climate change.

Another significant effect of global warming is the rise in sea level. Flooding is occurring in low-lying areas as a result of sea-level rise. Many countries have experienced extreme weather conditions. Every year, we have unusually heavy rain, extreme heat and cold, wildfires, and other natural disasters.

Similarly, as global warming continues, marine life is being severely impacted. This is causing the extinction of marine species as well as other problems. Furthermore, changes are expected in coral reefs, which will face extinction in the coming years. These effects will intensify in the coming years, effectively halting species expansion. Furthermore, humans will eventually feel the negative effects of Global Warming.

Also Read: Concept of Sustainable Development

Sample Essays on Global Warming

Here are some sample essays on Global Warming:

Essay on Global Warming Paragraph in 100 – 150 words

Global Warming is caused by the increase of carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere and is a result of human activities that have been causing harm to our environment for the past few centuries now. Global Warming is something that can’t be ignored and steps have to be taken to tackle the situation globally. The average temperature is constantly rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius over the last few years.

The best method to prevent future damage to the earth, cutting down more forests should be banned and Afforestation should be encouraged. Start by planting trees near your homes and offices, participate in events, and teach the importance of planting trees. It is impossible to undo the damage but it is possible to stop further harm.

Essay on Global Warming in 250 Words

Over a long period, it is observed that the temperature of the earth is increasing. This affected wildlife, animals, humans, and every living organism on earth. Glaciers have been melting, and many countries have started water shortages, flooding, and erosion and all this is because of global warming.

No one can be blamed for global warming except for humans. Human activities such as gases released from power plants, transportation, and deforestation have increased gases such as carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollutants in the earth’s atmosphere. The main question is how can we control the current situation and build a better world for future generations. It starts with little steps by every individual.

Start using cloth bags made from sustainable materials for all shopping purposes, instead of using high-watt lights use energy-efficient bulbs, switch off the electricity, don’t waste water, abolish deforestation and encourage planting more trees. Shift the use of energy from petroleum or other fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. Instead of throwing out the old clothes donate them to someone so that it is recycled.

Donate old books, don’t waste paper. Above all, spread awareness about global warming. Every little thing a person does towards saving the earth will contribute in big or small amounts. We must learn that 1% effort is better than no effort. Pledge to take care of Mother Nature and speak up about global warming.

Essay on Global Warming in 500 Words

Global warming isn’t a prediction, it is happening! A person denying it or unaware of it is in the most simple terms complicit. Do we have another planet to live on? Unfortunately, we have been bestowed with this one planet only that can sustain life yet over the years we have turned a blind eye to the plight it is in. Global warming is not an abstract concept but a global phenomenon occurring ever so slowly even at this moment. Global Warming is a phenomenon that is occurring every minute resulting in a gradual increase in the Earth’s overall climate. Brought about by greenhouse gases that trap the solar radiation in the atmosphere, global warming can change the entire map of the earth, displacing areas, flooding many countries, and destroying multiple lifeforms. Extreme weather is a direct consequence of global warming but it is not an exhaustive consequence. There are virtually limitless effects of global warming which are all harmful to life on earth. The sea level is increasing by 0.12 inches per year worldwide. This is happening because of the melting of polar ice caps because of global warming. This has increased the frequency of floods in many lowland areas and has caused damage to coral reefs. The Arctic is one of the worst-hit areas affected by global warming. Air quality has been adversely affected and the acidity of the seawater has also increased causing severe damage to marine life forms. Severe natural disasters are brought about by global warming which has had dire effects on life and property. As long as mankind produces greenhouse gases, global warming will continue to accelerate. The consequences are felt at a much smaller scale which will increase to become drastic shortly. The power to save the day lies in the hands of humans, the need is to seize the day. Energy consumption should be reduced on an individual basis. Fuel-efficient cars and other electronics should be encouraged to reduce the wastage of energy sources. This will also improve air quality and reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Global warming is an evil that can only be defeated when fought together. It is better late than never. If we all take steps today, we will have a much brighter future tomorrow. Global warming is the bane of our existence and various policies have come up worldwide to fight it but that is not enough. The actual difference is made when we work at an individual level to fight it. Understanding its import now is crucial before it becomes an irrevocable mistake. Exterminating global warming is of utmost importance and each one of us is as responsible for it as the next.

Also Read: Essay on Library: 100, 200 and 250 Words

Essay on Global Warming UPSC

Always hear about global warming everywhere, but do we know what it is? The evil of the worst form, global warming is a phenomenon that can affect life more fatally. Global warming refers to the increase in the earth’s temperature as a result of various human activities. The planet is gradually getting hotter and threatening the existence of lifeforms on it. Despite being relentlessly studied and researched, global warming for the majority of the population remains an abstract concept of science. It is this concept that over the years has culminated in making global warming a stark reality and not a concept covered in books. Global warming is not caused by one sole reason that can be curbed. Multifarious factors cause global warming most of which are a part of an individual’s daily existence. Burning of fuels for cooking, in vehicles, and for other conventional uses, a large amount of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, and methane amongst many others is produced which accelerates global warming. Rampant deforestation also results in global warming as lesser green cover results in an increased presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which is a greenhouse gas. Finding a solution to global warming is of immediate importance. Global warming is a phenomenon that has to be fought unitedly. Planting more trees can be the first step that can be taken toward warding off the severe consequences of global warming. Increasing the green cover will result in regulating the carbon cycle. There should be a shift from using nonrenewable energy to renewable energy such as wind or solar energy which causes less pollution and thereby hinder the acceleration of global warming. Reducing energy needs at an individual level and not wasting energy in any form is the most important step to be taken against global warming. The warning bells are tolling to awaken us from the deep slumber of complacency we have slipped into. Humans can fight against nature and it is high time we acknowledged that. With all our scientific progress and technological inventions, fighting off the negative effects of global warming is implausible. We have to remember that we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors but borrow it from our future generations and the responsibility lies on our shoulders to bequeath them a healthy planet for life to exist.

Climate Change and Global Warming Essay

Global Warming and Climate Change are two sides of the same coin. Both are interrelated with each other and are two issues of major concern worldwide. Greenhouse gases released such as carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollutants in the earth’s atmosphere cause Global Warming which leads to climate change. Black holes have started to form in the ozone layer that protects the earth from harmful ultraviolet rays.

Human activities have created climate change and global warming. Industrial waste and fumes are the major contributors to global warming.

Another factor affecting is the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and also one of the reasons for climate change. Global warming has resulted in shrinking mountain glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland, and the Arctic and causing climate change. Switching from the use of fossil fuels to energy sources like wind and solar.

When buying any electronic appliance buy the best quality with energy savings stars. Don’t waste water and encourage rainwater harvesting in your community.

Tips to Write an Essay

Writing an effective essay needs skills that few people possess and even fewer know how to implement. While writing an essay can be an assiduous task that can be unnerving at times, some key pointers can be inculcated to draft a successful essay. These involve focusing on the structure of the essay, planning it out well, and emphasizing crucial details.

Mentioned below are some pointers that can help you write better structure and more thoughtful essays that will get across to your readers:

Prepare an outline for the essay to ensure continuity and relevance and no break in the structure of the essay
Decide on a thesis statement that will form the basis of your essay. It will be the point of your essay and help readers understand your contention
Follow the structure of an introduction, a detailed body followed by a conclusion so that the readers can comprehend the essay in a particular manner without any dissonance.
Make your beginning catchy and include solutions in your conclusion to make the essay insightful and lucrative to read
Reread before putting it out and add your flair to the essay to make it more personal and thereby unique and intriguing for readers

Also Read: I Love My India Essay: 100 and 500+ Words in English for School Students

Ans. Both natural and man-made factors contribute to global warming. The natural one also contains methane gas, volcanic eruptions, and greenhouse gases. Deforestation, mining, livestock raising, burning fossil fuels, and other man-made causes are next.

Ans. The government and the general public can work together to stop global warming. Trees must be planted more often, and deforestation must be prohibited. Auto usage needs to be curbed, and recycling needs to be promoted.

Ans. Switching to renewable energy sources , adopting sustainable farming, transportation, and energy methods, and conserving water and other natural resources.

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Digvijay Singh

Having 2+ years of experience in educational content writing, withholding a Bachelor's in Physical Education and Sports Science and a strong interest in writing educational content for students enrolled in domestic and foreign study abroad programmes. I believe in offering a distinct viewpoint to the table, to help students deal with the complexities of both domestic and foreign educational systems. Through engaging storytelling and insightful analysis, I aim to inspire my readers to embark on their educational journeys, whether abroad or at home, and to make the most of every learning opportunity that comes their way.

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Essay: The Tragedy of Stopping Climate Change

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The Tragedy of Stopping Climate Change

The race is on to tell—or sell—the right story about global warming..

Climate Change

As nations everywhere struggle to decide how best to salvage Earth, perhaps it’s only to be expected that our global generalized anxiety disorder has reached the fever pitch of a writer under deadline: How should the plot to save the world proceed?

The 2051 Munich Climate Conference, organized by the Munich-based Büro Grandezza theater troupe and hosted by the Bellevue di Monaco center for refugees, met in September of this year to reverse-engineer an answer to this question. The conference invited scholars from around the world to present on climate attitudes in 2021 as if it were 30 years in the future, exactly one year after the carbon neutrality deadline set by the Paris Agreement. Such a unique call for papers promised an event at once wholly academic and wholly “fictional.” As Andreas Kohn, a founding member of Büro Grandezza, told me over Zoom a few days before I arrived for the gathering, the basic structure of the conference-cum-performance amounted to an urgent thought experiment in 20/20 hindsight: In 2051 people will look back on what we knew about curbing emissions and say, “Why didn’t they do that?’”

In the popular imagination, projections of climate futures tend to fall into one of two categories: utopia or dystopia. The fictional framework of the 2051 Munich Climate Conference is of a piece with a recent swell of interest in reshaping the public imagination for climate adaptation in ways that break through existing cliches, broadening the range of outcomes to include the vast gradient of possibilities that fall between extremes. Climate scientists have been marching more or less to the same, urgent drumbeat since the 1960s, when the first conclusive reports linking fossil fuels to the greenhouse effect were published. The discourse about how that science should be communicated, however, has taken a decisive turn. As part of a greater trend toward storytelling in the social and hard sciences in general, the emphasis has shifted from pumping the public with facts to furnishing voters with actionable climate narratives.

Evidence of the storytelling shift is now everywhere discussions of climate change are found. The Pulitzer Prize-winning climate journalist Dan Fagin has argued that storytelling is part of the solution to the climate crisis and that journalism about it needs to be packaged “in the form of a story, in the form of narrative, with characters, drama, and a connecting thread.” Political scientists, economists, and sociologists also increasingly place climate change in the context of the meaning-making narratives by which societies organize themselves. In Climate Change and Storytelling , Annika Arnold of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation situates climate narratives amid overwhelming evidence that climate adaptation will require cultural change, media coherence, and sidestepping the public paralysis that apocalyptic stories and images promote. A 2017 edition of the journal Energy Research & Social Science devoted an entire issue to “Using stories, narratives, and storytelling in energy and climate change research.” This emphasis on narrative and imagination has trickled from academia into popular discourse by way of public exhibitions like the one in Munich and by way of policymakers who have begun to listen; in 2016, the German Advisory Council on Global Change put these ideas into practice in its outline for a “normative compass” promoting cultural cohesion in matters of nature management and economic inequality.

The consensus couldn’t be clearer: The world is far behind emissions goals, and the right narratives can help to bridge the gap. As a novelist myself, this fascinates me. The greatest challenge of the century has been framed as a kind of writer’s block: What kind of story should we tell? And just how tragic or extreme does it need to be?

Coral and mangrove grows at the protected Bunaken Island Marine National Park in Manado on May 14, 2006. Foreign Policy illustration/ROMEO GACAD/AFP via Getty Images

On the first day of the 2051 climate conference, Munich epitomized the spatial-temporal paradox that makes motivating energy transformation so difficult: The skies were clear; the sun was out; balmy temperatures drew brunchgoers out to sidewalk cafes and picnic blankets, and yours truly into a pharmacy for a travel-sized bottle of sunscreen. Though devastating floods had ravaged southern Germany only a few months prior, on this mild afternoon, imminent disaster could not have seemed farther away.

The conference was organized around the key emissions target set by the Paris Agreement—to restrict global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius—which tends to map to the kind of binary thinking reflected in popular climate narratives. On the first day, presenters spoke from a dystopic 2051 where the world had surpassed the 1.5- or even 2-degree mark; on the second, they heralded from a far rosier future where emissions had been curbed. The dystopian version of 2051 saw the Maldives sink underwater and feasible adaptation strategies thwarted by populist political opportunism; in the more optimistic version, residents of American Samoa had successfully sued oil companies to fund climate adaptation efforts, and carbon capture had proved itself a cost-effective silver bullet. The fact that these scientists were speaking to us from any future at all suggested that, in either world, some iteration of civilized life had survived.

The range of presentations shed light on why talk of “reimagining” climate change can feel so attractive.

The range of presentations shed light on why talk of “reimagining” climate change can feel so attractive. (Indeed, one of the better-attended talks on the first afternoon was titled “The transformative potential of sociological imagination for eco-social change.”) As a voter, and in the face of overwhelming ecological uncertainty, it’s hard not to feel as if you’ve taken a seat at a craps table, and even then that someone else is rolling the dice. Hypothetical accounts of 2051 breathe reality into a variety of potential policy pathways, making an unstable and seemingly distant future less abstract.

Notably, the most engaging of those accounts—like most engaging 20th-century novels—tended to focus on national, as opposed to global, frameworks. In “Locked-in: Revisiting coastal adaptation policies in the Maldives,” Geronimo Gussmann, a sociologist at Humboldt University in Berlin specializing in oceanographic adaptation, historicized the resilience and innovation of a Maldivian people whose chance for climate preparedness had slipped through the cracks of politicians’ opportunism. Forgone solutions included planting mangrove forests, building sea walls, and diverting resources to the islands most in need, rather than to the islands most likely to vote for a particular candidate. Another performance by the English artist Nico Powell took the form of letters to newspaper advice columnists, and was delivered from a future where a stagnant Gulf Stream has left England under a permanent gray cloud, and automation and fear have eliminated the need for citizens to ever leave their homes. (The COVID-19 lockdown is itself increasingly a reference point for possible climate futures.) These imagined pathways—which also featured some of the best role-playing of the sessions I saw—rested on specificity and detail, on ethical nuance, and, crucially, on problems dramatized at the national, as opposed to global, scale.

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Throughout the presentations, scholars became characters of themselves. They spoke of the research they were doing “back in 2021,” revised their ages, referred to their creaking joints. They were acting—and not without a hint of irony. No wonder: In many ways, they were also adopting the perspective of the literary climate novel or the Hollywood disaster film, works of fiction set in ecologically altered futures that explore the dystopian or utopian consequences of environmental neglect. As with any modeling exercise, adapting the techniques and assumptions of a discipline like fiction-making to the purpose of extrapolating real-world outcomes—and climate change narratives have an especially pressing mandate to do so—is a tricky business. The results can be confusing, even fraught. During a Q&A with another scholar who’d called for more abstract renovations of the “eco-sociological imagination,” Gussmann broke character to pose an impassioned query of his own: “But who are we telling these stories to? The public? Multinational corporations? Who is the ‘we’?” The silence that followed marked one of those moments when fiction can begin to strain against the urgency of the real.

Gussmann’s question touched on a problem perennial to all storytellers in a globalized moment. Narratives thrive on the specificity of national and local communities (nationalists, of course, have also been known to leverage the power of storytelling); climate change, by contrast, is terrifyingly global. But for a phenomenon that so readily invites imaginative extremes, equally challenging for climate storytellers is the question of how such narratives ought to end. There is overwhelming evidence that apocalyptic alarmism and utopic techno-optimism alike fail to foster necessary change, instead engendering public paralysis and procrastination. And according to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, it is also no longer possible to avoid measurable effects of climate change. While there is still a great deal that humans can and must do, those activities might in fact be best framed in terms of avoiding extremes: We have entered the mitigation phase.

And mitigation can pose a problem, as far as climate storytelling goes. Falling short of either overwhelming victory or disaster, mitigation narratives aim to capture a global audience with the varieties of tragedy that lie in between. When was the last time you saw a blockbuster premiere under the tagline “Well, it could have been worse…”?

Water runs down the melting Northern Schneeferner glacier into a small lake on the Zugspitze plateau near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, on on Sept. 8, 2020. Foreign Policy illustration/Sean Gallup/Getty Images

“All of writing is a huge lake,” the British novelist Jean Rhys reportedly told a friend . “There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake.” From the social sciences to marketing studies, the call for narrative often evokes Rhys’s literary sensibility: We are each a little tributary to the collective sea of human experience.

With the rise of digital advertising, however, literary storytelling has ceded ground to corporate strategists who borrow the language and techniques of spinning yarns in order to sell: All that matters is here is real-world outcomes. In the digital space, businesses and individuals have become brands, moving beyond satisfying basic consumer needs and desires to inviting prospective buyers to join their stories. As the self-fashioned marketing guru Joe Pulizzi wrote in a widely distributed 2012 paper “The Rise of Storytelling as the New Marketing,” “Who would have ever guessed that the future of marketing is, in fact, not marketing at all, but publishing?” The most famous adman of the 20th century, David Ogilvy, laid the groundwork for marketing-as-publishing with his “soft sell” approach; by leveraging nuanced narrative to entertain consumers and hold attention, the salesperson forgoes the immediate transaction today to influence long-term buying habits tomorrow. The “hard sell,” by contrast, goes in for the impulse buy and favors alarmist, insistent language. You might say that the discourse on climate change storytelling has recently undergone a shift from hard sell to soft.

With the rise of digital advertising, however, literary storytelling has ceded ground to corporate strategists who borrow the language and techniques of spinning yarns in order to sell.

There’s a reason that the kind of storyteller interested in motivating action—to buy a ticket, to make a purchase, to support a political cause—is attracted to narrating extremes. Narratives of disaster or the victory of good over evil unfold according to simplified moral schema and in realms beyond individual control; support comes easily because the villains and the heroes are made clear, as are the stakes for the reader. Any practitioner of fiction aiming for rapid, popular, emotional engagement might therefore wonder about the dramatic potential of mitigation as a narrative arc. Novelists call this a problem of content and form: The formal narrative structures that seem best equipped to capture the public eco-imagination—dystopian thrillers, techno-utopias, ad campaigns, or policy platforms promising instant gratification—aren’t necessarily those best suited to describing the potential realities we face. This is a recipe for writer’s block indeed.

Climate change is not without its own streamlined moral schema. Oil companies and politicians who actively lobby against energy transformation really do serve the world a serious evil, while inspiration for climate activism is claimed by new technologies and the young. From this view, the ethics of energy transformation seem rather straightforward after all. In the kickoff session to the 2051 Munich Climate Conference, keynote speaker Saleemul Huq, a climate scientist and the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, imagined that a world of mitigated climate change will have young people, fossil fuel-free economic development, and the leadership of women and people of color to thank. Who could argue against the social and ecological value of that future or the redistributed decision-making power it portends? And yet, one suspects that between the oil companies and the charismatic, ambitious new generation of leaders on which we might hang our hopes, there lies a large, diverse sector of the global population for whom climate adaptation will not feel like an immediate victory: In no successful ecological future can a coal worker in West Virginia or South Africa keep their job; in no climate future will citizens of low-lying atoll islands like the Maldives or American Samoa evade an existential threat to their national sovereignty and physical survival. A more complex narrative anticipates long-term, achievable success while also recognizing the short-term pain that attends economic transformation.

When I asked Büro Grandezza about the role of mitigation narratives that clear space for outcomes falling somewhere in between wholesale victory and disaster, there was some reluctance to accept the implication that more sanguine futures have been foreclosed. “I don’t think that we need to think about the in-between,” Kohn said, “because I think at the moment we are only telling this story.” He emphasized that staying under 1.5 degrees Celsius is still technically possible, only “nobody seems to believe it will happen.” The goal of the second day of the conference, he emphasized, was to make that 1.5 degree scenario credible without glossing social inequities. After a pause, however, his colleague Christiane Pfau added, “It’s good for some, it’s bad for others. And that is somehow dystopic and utopic at the same time.”

A 1794 engraving of King Lear. Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

If marketing narratives are explicitly designed to incite targeted action (the sale) and reshape reality (consumer perceptions), literary fictions, by contrast—and to borrow a concept from the novelist Henry James—tend to exist in competition with reality. With such an urgent need to change course on climate, what could an approach prioritizing aesthetics over action possibly have to add?

In the effort to loot existing narrative modes for a climate match, one quasi-literary narrative model that has emerged is the Narrative Policy Framework, which argues that scientific data and facts ought to be presented to the public enmeshed in narratives that tell the story of policy pathways. The framework includes four main elements: characters (victims, villains, and heroes), a political setting in which a problem is contextualized, a moral presented in the form of a solution to the political problem, and a plot linking these elements through relations of cause and effect. It’s a welcome innovation that should and is being introduced in real-world situations.

But it might also be useful to recall that for the modern fiction writer, over and above paradigms of character, setting, moral, and plot, the craft of storytelling comes down to the art of managing reader expectations. In writing workshops, this idea of managing expectations is a veritable cliche. It carries through to other well-worn tropes, such as the idea that a story’s end ought to be both inevitable and surprising: inevitable insofar as we expected something like it to come along; surprising in that the denouement undercuts those expectations just enough to keep the finale from seeming predetermined or contrived. The explanatory power of these stories lies not in furnishing actionable, real-world purpose (truth and beauty, James argued, are “purpose enough”), but in modeling how we prepare ourselves for, and make sense of, endings that cannot possibly be predicted.

Frank Kermode’s A Sense of an Ending , now considered one of the most important works of Western literary criticism of the 20th century, argued that all literature, diverse as it is, bears the trace of the ancient human desire to “make sense” of endings, in particular of the apocalypse. This long-standing need to anticipate and negotiate crisis through narrative is reflected in the history of our fictional frameworks, which, like scientific models, are continually updated as our understanding of the world evolves. As humans began to recognize their own historical agency, narratives drifted away from paradigmatic, ancient story structures of the apocalypse—the Bible, the myth—to embrace uncircumscribed structures that sidestep any resolution at all; “they have become more ‘open,’” Kermode writes. The argument here is that apocalypse is no longer viewed as “imminent,” a conclusion to be anticipated, but “immanent,” a permanent state “stretched” across the present; it has already arrived in the form of genocide, the hydrogen bomb, ecological crisis. This clears a wide, unpredictable space for what lies ahead, given that we’re already living “in the middest” of extremes.

“In their general character our fictions have certainly moved away from the simplicity of the paradigm,” Kermode writes. And loosening those genre conventions fundamentally changes the narrative experience for reader and writer both. The reader has fewer genre cues to set expectations from the get-go, while the writer, meanwhile, bears the responsibility of discovering new narrative forms that prepare the reader for a more moderate kind of close—one that concludes the story but not, necessarily, the narrative world. As an example, consider that the reader of a classical tragedy knows the play must end in a death even before they open the text. What we tend to call modern literature, by contrast, has fewer signposts. The writer has to teach the reader how to read the plot from scratch, incorporating a “sense of an ending” into every stage of the story.

That the reader isn’t able to fully anticipate the bloody culmination or even explicate its significance is part of what lends the play its quality of truth.

The American critic Francine Prose recalls discovering the power of managing reader expectations in this way during a school exercise in which she was asked to track the mention of eyes in Shakespeare’s King Lear , leading up to the famous scene where Gloucester’s own are gouged: “[T]he language of vision and its opposite was preparing us, consciously or unconsciously, for those violent mutilations.” The gore is shocking when it arrives—yet in retrospect, it’s clear Shakespeare took care to prepare us for this outcome all along. That the reader isn’t able to fully anticipate the bloody culmination or even explicate its significance is part of what lends the play its quality of truth. The more a story imitates the contingencies and unpredictability of real life, the more it seems to belong, Kermode says, to one of those tales “which, by upsetting the ordinary balance of our naïve expectations, is finding something out for us, something real. ”

Perhaps one of the reasons climate change is so difficult to “make sense” of through narrative is that this most modern of crises so clearly reflects ancient structures of apocalyptic prophecy. Business-as-usual climate models predict the end of the world quite as literally and conclusively as medieval Christendom’s anticipation of the Second Coming of A.D. 1000. This prophetic structure—backed, like earlier prophecies, by experts and data—invites intuitive, ancient story arcs that dramatize the exploitative dynamic between godlike powers and human mortals. At the same time, climate change couldn’t be more contemporary, nor could the attitude needed to avert its most terrifying manifestations; preparing ourselves for less tragic endings requires the open-endedness of continual compromise.

A few weeks after the Munich conference, I found myself on a Zoom seminar hosted by the Climate Transparency Report discussing how much the World Bank ought to lend a coal-dependent, middle-income, segregated country like South Africa, where some 80,000 miners—most of them living in rural districts, most of them Black—stand to lose their jobs. It is far too costly to keep coal plants open—and yet to close them also comes with costs.

The modern novel models this kind of modern consciousness, one whose expectations are tied not so much to foreclosed temporal ends but to the negotiation of a present in permanent crisis: How hard are these characters’ lives going to be in the immediate term? The world did not end in A.D. 1000, just as it did not end on so many other occasions it was supposed to have. Even still, “Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited,” Kermode writes. The raison d’être of modern literature, maybe, is precisely to disconfirm apocalyptic narratives, so comforting in their simplicity and yet terrifying in their finality. The End will always wield authority over the human imagination, but combating the attitude of knowingness that frames it as imminent clears space for the anxious-making range of outcomes where life, in fact, goes on.

Polar bears feed at a garbage dump near the village of Belushya Guba, on the remote Russian northern Novaya Zemlya archipelago, on Oct. 31, 2018. Foreign Policy illustration/ALEXANDER GRIR/AFP via Getty Images

So, how do you sell compromise? I went into the Munich Climate Conference as a novelist expecting to write about exercises in imagining varieties of tragedy. The longer I spent in 2051, the more I became convinced that what we are after here isn’t storytelling at all, but marketing. The more important that question of audience action is for the story you’re telling, the more it seems to me that we move from “feeding the lake” to pushing action in the real world—in particular, to selling people on short-term costs for long-term gains.

This isn’t to say that writers, novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights don’t think about audience, activism, or real-world outcomes. Quite to the contrary: Büro Grandezza’s interventionist theater methods intentionally blur the line between political activism and art. As member Benno Heisel said of the troupe’s own artistic relationship to the 2051 conference, “It is an arts project, because that’s what we do. However, the starting point and the goal of the project are political ideas.” But while artists may be politically motivated, most do not tell stories with the primary aim of influencing the audience’s behavior or spending patterns in specific, measurable, and reproduceable ways. Even the climate novelist, journalist, and activist Kim Stanley Robinson, whose recent novel The Ministry for the Future is perhaps one of the most popular examples of climate mitigation narratives to date, has said that above all, he sets out “first, to write a good novel.” A salesperson, by contrast, is motivated solely to persuade you to buy—or buy into—something you never previously imagined. They tell stories not merely to captivate but to persuade.

When I asked a young father attending the first day of the conference if the morning’s sessions had inspired any hope, he reached for Franz Kafka: “He said something about how there’s plenty of hope, just not for us.”

And yet, there is something fundamentally dissatisfying, if not inappropriate, in importing the corporate strategist’s point of view wholesale. The ethical complexities of energy transformation extend up and down social and class hierarchies at the national and global scales, complicating the roles of protagonist and antagonist, and inviting uncathartic limbos—mitigation requires enduring what novelists call “peripeteia,” or sudden reversals in fortunes, which energy transition will require. Perhaps that’s why novels kept coming up at the Munich conference. “In order for everything to stay the same, everything has to change,” the climate economist Michael Pahle paraphrased from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, a modern Italian classic of a decadent Sicilian family in decline. When I asked a young father attending the first day of the conference if the morning’s sessions had inspired any hope, he reached for Franz Kafka: “He said something about how there’s plenty of hope, just not for us.”

Luckily, it isn’t the job of a storyteller to provide hope but simply to aim for truth—or at least so says Henry James. The collective writer’s block for climate narratives might therefore seem less insurmountable if the goal is scaled back from saving the life on Earth to providing credible models for how humans manage expectations in a world that has profoundly disappointed them—first by repeatedly disconfirming the arrival of imminent apocalypse, then by allowing apocalypse to slip in nevertheless through the back door of the present and, furthermore, to distribute its effects so unequally. Climate change is one of the greatest regressive taxes the world has ever faced. For policymakers who find themselves in the uncomfortable position of drafting plots to solve it while still remaining open to a range of mitigation efforts, a good place to start might be promising to minimize losses for those who will be required to give something up. This likely means selling us on the truth: In the short term, some will lose.

“The consumer is not a moron,” Ogilvy famously said, in what turned out to be the best sales pitch the soft sell ever had.

Here’s how a novelist might tell a story about rapidly changing course: If you ever take the 6:37 p.m. train from the Berlin Südkreuz railway station to Munich, as I did to attend the 2051 conference, you should know that it splits in Leipzig. One half goes on to Munich; the other, to Jena, a city hundreds of miles to the north. If you choose the wrong half, you’re in for a long night.

To correct my mistake, I backtracked to a regional hub where I could catch another high-speed train. En route, I met a young doctor from Mexico looking to make the same connection. We talked about vaccines. We talked about Haruki Murakami fan fiction. (He’d written some.) Our regional train was delayed, and the transfer would be tight. A third passenger walked up and down the aisles, looking for a conductor who might call ahead. Didn’t anybody work here? Who the hell was in charge? As we pulled into the station and shouldered our bags, readying ourselves to sprint, I joked, “ Wer als Erster kommt an, halte die Tür auf. ”

Whoever gets there first, hold the door.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens is a novelist and journalist based in Geneva, where she covers European culture and the climate movement. Her most recent book is Ghost Pains , a story collection exploring the legacies of the 20th century . Twitter: @JezewskaJ

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Essay on Global Warming – Causes and Solutions

500+ words essay on global warming.

Global Warming is a term almost everyone is familiar with. But, its meaning is still not clear to most of us. So, Global warming refers to the gradual rise in the overall temperature of the atmosphere of the Earth. There are various activities taking place which have been increasing the temperature gradually. Global warming is melting our ice glaciers rapidly. This is extremely harmful to the earth as well as humans. It is quite challenging to control global warming; however, it is not unmanageable. The first step in solving any problem is identifying the cause of the problem. Therefore, we need to first understand the causes of global warming that will help us proceed further in solving it. In this essay on Global Warming, we will see the causes and solutions of Global Warming.

Causes of Global Warming

Global warming has become a grave problem which needs undivided attention. It is not happening because of a single cause but several causes. These causes are both natural as well as manmade. The natural causes include the release of greenhouses gases which are not able to escape from earth, causing the temperature to increase.

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Further, volcanic eruptions are also responsible for global warming. That is to say, these eruptions release tons of carbon dioxide which contributes to global warming. Similarly, methane is also one big issue responsible for global warming.

So, when one of the biggest sources of absorption of carbon dioxide will only disappear, there will be nothing left to regulate the gas. Thus, it will result in global warming. Steps must be taken immediately to stop global warming and make the earth better again.

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Global Warming Solutions

As stated earlier, it might be challenging but it is not entirely impossible. Global warming can be stopped when combined efforts are put in. For that, individuals and governments, both have to take steps towards achieving it. We must begin with the reduction of greenhouse gas.

Furthermore, they need to monitor the consumption of gasoline. Switch to a hybrid car and reduce the release of carbon dioxide. Moreover, citizens can choose public transport or carpool together. Subsequently, recycling must also be encouraged.

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For instance, when you go shopping, carry your own cloth bag. Another step you can take is to limit the use of electricity which will prevent the release of carbon dioxide. On the government’s part, they must regulate industrial waste and ban them from emitting harmful gases in the air. Deforestation must be stopped immediately and planting of trees must be encouraged.

In short, all of us must realize the fact that our earth is not well. It needs to treatment and we can help it heal. The present generation must take up the responsibility of stopping global warming in order to prevent the suffering of future generations. Therefore, every little step, no matter how small carries a lot of weight and is quite significant in stopping global warming.

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FAQs on Global Warming

Q.1 List the causes of Global Warming.

A.1 There are various causes of global warming both natural and manmade. The natural one includes a greenhouse gas, volcanic eruption, methane gas and more. Next up, manmade causes are deforestation, mining, cattle rearing, fossil fuel burning and more.

Q.2 How can one stop Global Warming?

A.2 Global warming can be stopped by a joint effort by the individuals and the government. Deforestation must be banned and trees should be planted more. The use of automobiles must be limited and recycling must be encouraged.

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Silhouette of a person walking through a spray of water at sunset with cars and buildings in the background.

Soaring temperatures in New York, July 2010. Photo by Eric Thayer/Reuters

The melting brain

It’s not just the planet and not just our health – the impact of a warming climate extends deep into our cortical fissures.

by Clayton Page Aldern + BIO

In February 1884, the English art critic and polymath John Ruskin took the lectern at the London Institution for a pair of lectures on the weather. ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’ was his invective against a particular ‘wind of darkness’ and ‘plague-cloud’ that, in his estimate, had begun to envelope Victorian cities only in recent years. He had been taking careful meteorological measurements, he told a sceptical audience. He railed against the ‘bitterness and malice’ of the new weather in question; and, perhaps more importantly, about how it mirrored a certain societal ‘moral gloom’. You could read in us what you could read in the weather, he suggested.

A painting of a landscape with a blue sea, mountains on the left, and dramatic, swirling clouds in the sky.

July Thundercloud in the Val d’Aosta (1858) by John Ruskin. Courtesy Wikipedia

It was easy that February, and perhaps easy today, to disregard any alleged winds of darkness as the ravings of a madman. Clouds are clouds: even if Ruskin’s existed – which was a question of some contemporaneous debate – it would be untoward to imagine they bore any relationship with the human psyche. As Brian Dillon observed of the cloud lectures in The Paris Review in 2019, it can be hard to tell where Ruskin’s ‘bad weather ends and his own ragged, doleful mood begins.’ In 1886, Ruskin suffered a mental breakdown while giving a talk in Oxford. By the end of his life at the turn of the century, he was widely considered insane. His ramblings on meteorology and the human spirit aren’t exactly treated with the same gravitas as his books on J M W Turner.

And yet, for Ruskin, the clouds weren’t just clouds: they were juiced up by a ‘dense manufacturing mist’, as he’d noted in a diary entry. The plague-clouds embodied the miasma of the Industrial Revolution; the moral gloom was specifically that which arose from the rapid societal and environmental changes that were afoot. Ruskin’s era had seen relentless transformation of pastoral landscapes into industrial hubs. Everything smelled like sulphur and suffering. Soot-filled air, chemical and human waste, the clamour of machinery – these were more than just physical nuisances. They were assaults on the senses, shaping moods and behaviour in ways that were not yet fully understood.

A dark, moody painting of an industrial landscape with smokestacks and rooftops, under a cloudy sky with hints of light in the distance.

Mining Area (1852-1905) by Constantin Meunier. Courtesy Wikipedia

Ruskin believed that the relentless pace of industrialisation, with its cacophony of tools and sprawling factories and environmental destruction, undermined psychological wellbeing: that the mind, much like the body, required a healthy social and physical environment to thrive. This was actually a somewhat new idea. (Isaac Ray, a founder of the American Psychiatric Association, wouldn’t define the idea of ‘mental hygiene’, the precursor to mental health, until 1893.) Instability in the environment, for Ruskin, begot instability in the mind. One reflected the other.

M ore than a century later, as we grapple with a new suite of breakneck environmental changes, the plague-clouds are again darkly literal. Global average surface temperatures have risen by about 1.1°C (2°F) since the pre-industrial era, with most of this warming occurring in the past 40 years. Ice is melting; seas are steadily rising; storms are – well, you know this story. And yet, most frequently, it is still a story of the world out there: the world outside of us. The narrative of climate change is one of meteorological extremes, economic upheaval and biodiversity losses. But perhaps it is worth taking a maybe-mad Ruskin seriously. What of our internal clouds? As the climate crisis warps weather and acidifies oceans and shatters temperature records with frightening regularity, one is tempted to ask if our minds are changing in kind.

Here are some of the most concerning answers in the affirmative. Immigration judges are less likely to rule in favour of asylum seekers on hotter days. On such days, students behave as if they’ve lost a quarter-year of education, relative to temperate days. Warmer school years correspond to lower rates of learning. Temperature predicts the incidence of online hate speech. Domestic violence spikes with warmer weather. Suicide , too.

In baseball, pitchers are more likely to hit batters with their pitches on hot days

But you already know what this feels like. Perhaps you’re more ornery in the heat. Maybe you feel a little slow in the head. It’s harder to focus and easier to act impulsively. Tomes of cognitive neuroscience and behavioural economics research back you up, and it’s not all as dire as domestic violence. Drivers honk their horns more frequently (and lean on them longer) at higher temperatures. Heat predicts more aggressive penalties in sport. In baseball, pitchers are more likely to hit batters with their pitches on hot days – and the outdoor temperature is an even stronger predictor of their tendency to retaliate in this manner if they’ve witnessed an opposing pitcher do the same thing.

In other words: it would appear the plague-clouds are within us, too. They illustrate the interconnectedness of our inner and outer worlds. They betray a certain flimsiness of human agency, painting our decision-making in strokes of environmental influence far bolder than our intuition suggests. And they throw the climate crisis into fresh, stark relief: because, yes, as the climate changes, so do we.

T he London Institution closed in 1912. These days, when you want to inveigh against adverse environmental-mind interactions, you publish a paper in The Lancet . And so that is what 24 mostly British, mostly clinical neurologists did in May 2024, arguing that the ‘incidence, prevalence, and severity of many nervous system conditions’ can be affected by global warming. For these researchers, led by Sanjay Sisodiya, professor of neurology at University College London in the UK, the climate story is indeed one of internal clouds.

In their survey of 332 scientific studies, Sisodiya and his colleagues show that climatic influence extends far beyond behaviour and deep into cortical fissures. Aspects of migraine, stroke, seizure and multiple sclerosis all appear to be temperature dependent. In Taiwan, report the authors, the risk of schizophrenia hospitalisation increases with widening daytime temperature ranges. In California , too, ‘hospital visits for any mental health disorder, self-harm, intentional injury of another person, or homicide’ rise with broader daily temperature swings. In Switzerland , hospitalisations for psychiatric disorders increase with temperature, with the risk particularly pronounced for those with developmental disorders and schizophrenia.

Outside the hospital, climate change is extending the habitable range of disease vectors like ticks, mosquitoes and bats, causing scientists to forecast an increased incidence of vector-borne and zoonotic brain maladies like yellow fever, Zika and cerebral malaria. Outside the healthcare system writ large, a changing environment bears on sensory systems and perception, degrading both sensory information and the biological tools we use to process it. Outside the realm of the even remotely reasonable, warming freshwater brings with it an increased frequency of cyanobacterial blooms, the likes of which release neurotoxins that increase the risk of neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease).

Experiencing natural disasters in utero greatly increases children’s risk of anxiety, depression and ADHD

Indeed, recent studies suggest that climate change may be exacerbating the already substantial burden of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In countries with warmer-than-average climates, more intense warming has been linked to a greater increase in Parkinson’s cases and, as Sisodiya et al note, the highest forecasted rates of increase in dementia prevalence are ‘expected to be in countries experiencing the largest effects of climate change’. Similarly, short-term exposure to high temperatures appears to drive up emergency department visits for Alzheimer’s patients. The air we breathe likely plays a complementary role: in Mexico City, for example, where residents are exposed to high levels of fine particulate matter and ozone from a young age, autopsies have revealed progressive Alzheimer’s pathology in 99 per cent of those under the age of 30.

The risks aren’t limited to those alive today. In 2022, for example, an epidemiological study revealed that heat exposure during early pregnancy is associated with a significantly increased risk of children developing schizophrenia, anorexia and other neuropsychiatric conditions. High temperatures during gestation have long been known to delay neurodevelopment in rats. Other scientists have shown that experiencing natural disasters in utero greatly increases children’s risk of anxiety, depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and conduct disorders later in life. Such effects cast the intergenerational responsibilities of the Anthropocene in harsh new light – not least because, as Sisodiya and colleagues write, there is a tremendous ‘global disparity between regions most affected by climate change (both now and in the future) and regions in which the majority of studies are undertaken.’ We don’t know what we don’t know.

What we do know is that the brain is emerging, in study after study, as one of climate change’s most vulnerable landscapes.

It is a useful reorientation. Return to the horn-honking and the baseball pitchers for a moment. A focus on the brain sheds some potential mechanistic light on the case studies and allows us to avoid phrases like ‘wind of darkness’. Higher temperatures, for example, appear to shift functional brain networks – the coordinated behaviour of various regions – toward randomised activity. In extreme heat, scientists have taken note of an overworked dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), the evolutionarily new brain region that the neuroendocrinologist Robert M Sapolsky at Stanford University in the US calls ‘the definitive rational decider in the frontal cortex’. The dlPFC limits the degree to which people make impulsive decisions; disrupted dlPFC activity tends to imply a relatively heightened influence of limbic structures (like the emotionally attuned amygdala) on behaviour. More heat, less rational decision-making.

When extreme heat reaches into your mind and tips your scales toward violence, it is constraining your choices

The physicality of environmental influence on the brain is more widespread than the dlPFC – and spans multiple spatial scales. Heat stress in zebrafish, for example, down-regulates the expression of proteins relevant to synapse construction and neurotransmitter release. In mice, heat also triggers inflammation in the hippocampus, a brain region necessary for memory formation and storage. While neuroinflammation often plays an initially protective role, chronic activation of immune cells – like microglia and astrocytes – can turn poisonous, since pro-inflammatory molecules can damage brain cells in the long run. In people, hyperthermia is associated with decreased blood flow to this region. Psychologists’ observations of waning cognition and waxing aggression at higher temperatures makes a world of sense in the context of such findings.

The nascent field of environmental neuroscience seeks to ‘understand the qualitative and quantitative relationships between the external environment, neurobiology, psychology and behaviour’. Searching for a more specific neologism – since that particular phrase also encompasses environmental exposures like noise, urban development, lighting and crime – we might refer to our budding, integrative field as climatological neuroepidemiology. Or, I don’t know, maybe we need something snappier for TikTok. Neuroclimatology? Ecological neurodynamics?

I tend to prefer: the weight of nature.

The weight forces our hands, as in the case of the behavioural effects highlighted above. When extreme heat reaches into your mind and tips your scales toward violence, it is constraining your choices. By definition, impulsive decisions are rooted in comparatively less reflection than considered decisions: to the extent that a changing climate influences our reactions and decision-making, we should understand it as compromising our perceived free will. The weight of nature is heavy. It displaces us.

It is also a heavy psychological burden to carry. You are likely familiar with the notion of climate anxiety . The phrase, which tends to refer to a near-pathological state of worry and fear of impending environmental destruction, has never sat particularly well with me. Anxiety, as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual , is usually couched in terms of ‘excessive’ worry. I’m not convinced there’s anything excessive about seeing the climatic writing on the wall and feeling a sense of doom. Perhaps we ought to consider the climate-anxious as having more developed brains than the rest of the litter – that the Cassandras are the only sane ones left.

I ’m not exactly joking. Neuroscience has begun to study the brains in question, and not for nothing. The midcingulate cortex, a central hub in the brain’s threat-detection circuitry, may hold some clues to the condition’s biological basis: in one 2024 study , for example, researchers at Northern Michigan University in the US found that people who reported higher levels of anxiety about climate change showed distinct patterns of brain structure and function in this region, relative to those with lower levels of climate anxiety – and irrespective of base levels of anxiety writ large. In particular, the climate-anxious brain appears to play host to a smaller midcingulate (in terms of grey matter), but one that’s functionally more connected to other key hubs in the brain’s salience network, a system understood to constantly scan the environment for emotionally relevant information. In the salience network, the midcingulate cortex works hand in hand with limbic structures like the amygdala and insula to prepare the body to respond appropriately to this type of information. In people with climate anxiety, this network may be especially attuned to signals of climate-related threats.

Rather than indicating a deficiency, then, a diminutive midcingulate might reflect a more efficient, finely honed threat-detection system. The brain is well known to prune redundant connections over time, preserving only the most useful neural pathways. Selective sculpting, suggest the Michigan researchers, may allow the climate-anxious brain to process worrisome information more effectively, facilitating rapid communication between the midcingulate and other regions involved in threat anticipation and response. In other words, they write, the climate-anxious midcingulate might be characterised by ‘more efficient wiring’.

This neural sensitivity to potential dangers could be both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it may attune some people to the very real perils of the future. The midcingulate is critical for anticipating future threats, and meta-analyses have found the region to be consistently activated when people contemplate unpredictable negative outcomes. Given the looming spectre of climate catastrophe, a hair-trigger threat-detection system could be an adaptive asset.

Climate anxiety is not just a sociocultural phenomenon. It has a theoretically identifiable neural correlate

On the other hand, argue the researchers:

[T]he complexity, uncertainty, as well as temporal and geographical distance of the climate crisis, in addition to its global nature, may lead individuals to deprioritising the risks associated with climate change, or becoming overwhelmed and disengaged – a state sometimes referred to as ‘eco-paralysis’.

An overactive midcingulate has been implicated in clinical anxiety disorders, and the new findings suggest that climate anxiety shares some of the same neural underpinnings. (It’s important to recall that climate anxiety seems to be distinct from generalised anxiety, though, as the brain differences observed in the Michigan study couldn’t be explained by overall anxiety levels.)

Ultimately, while speculative, these findings suggest that climate anxiety is not merely a sociocultural phenomenon, but one with theoretically identifiable neural correlates. They provide a potential biological framework for understanding why some people may be more psychologically impacted by climate change than others. And they raise intriguing questions about whether the brains of the climate anxious are particularly well-suited for confronting the existential threat of a warming world – or whether they are vulnerable to becoming overwhelmed by it. In all cases, though, they illustrate that world reaching inward.

T here is perhaps a flipside to be realised here. A changing climate is seeping into our very neurobiology. What might it mean to orient our neurobiology toward climate change?

Such is the premise of a 2023 article in Nature Climate Change by the neuroscientist Kimberly Doell at the University of Vienna in Austria and her colleagues, who argue that the field is well positioned to inform our understanding of climate-adaptation responses and pro-environmental decision-making. In the decades since Ruskin shook his fists at the sky, environmental neuroscience has begun to probe the reciprocal dance between organisms and their ecological niches. We know now that the textures of modern environments – green spaces, urban sprawl, socioeconomic strata – all leave their mark on the brain. Climate change is no different.

Accordingly, argue Doell et al, scientists and advocates alike can integrate findings from neuroscience to improve communications strategies aimed at spurring climate action. They want to turn the tables, taking advantage of insights from neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience to more effectively design climate solutions – both within ourselves and for society as a whole.

The Anthropocene’s fever dream is already warping our wetware

We have models for this type of approach. Poverty research, for instance, has long implicated socioeconomic conditions with subpar health. In more recent years, neuroscience has reverse-engineered the pathways by which poverty’s various insults – understimulation, toxic exposures, chronic stress – can erode neural architecture and derail cognitive development. Brain science alone won’t solve poverty, yet even a limited understanding of these mechanisms has spurred research in programmes like Head Start, a family-based preschool curriculum that has been shown to boost selective attention (as evident in electrophysiological recordings) and cognitive test scores. While the hydra of structural inequity is not easily slain, neuroscientists have managed to shine some light on poverty’s neural correlates, flag its reversible harms, and design precision remedies accordingly. This same potential, argue Doell and her colleagues, extends to the neuroscience of climate change.

To realise this potential, though, we need to further understand how the Anthropocene’s fever dream is already warping our wetware. Social and behavioural science have begun cataloguing the psychological fallout of a planet in flux, but a neural taxonomy of climate change awaits. The field’s methodological and conceptual arsenal is primed for the challenge, but honing it will demand alliances with climate science, medicine, psychology, political science and beyond.

Some are trying. For example, the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles, US, recognising a need for answers, last year put out a call for scientists to investigate how neural systems are responding to ecological upheaval. With a trial $5 million, the foundation aims to illuminate how habitat loss, light pollution and other environmental insults may be influencing the molecular, cellular and circuit-level machinery of brains, human and otherwise. The central question is: in a biosphere where change is the only constant, are neural systems plastic enough to keep pace, or will they be left struggling to adapt?

The first wave of researchers to take up Kavli’s challenge are studying a diverse array of creatures, each uniquely positioned to reveal insights about the brain’s resilience in the face of planetary disruption. Wolfgang Stein at Illinois State University in the US and Steffen Harzsch at University of Greifswald in Germany, for example, focus on crustaceans, seeking to understand how their neural thermal regulators cope with rising temperatures in shallow and deep waters. Another group has targeted the brains of cephalopods, whose RNA-editing prowess may be key to their ability to tolerate plummeting oxygen levels in their increasingly suffocating aquatic habitats. A third Kavli cohort, led by Florence Kermen at University of Copenhagen in Denmark, is subjecting zebrafish to extreme temperatures, scouring their neurons and glial cells for the molecular signatures that allow them to thrive – even as their watery world heats up.

These initial investments have sparked federal curiosity. In December 2023, the US National Science Foundation joined forces with Kavli, inviting researchers to submit research proposals that seek to probe the ‘modulatory, homeostatic, adaptive, and/or evolutionary mechanisms that impact neurophysiology in response to anthropogenic environmental influence’. We may not be in arms-race territory yet, but at least there’s a suggestion that we’re beginning to walk in the right direction.

T he brain, that spongy command centre perched atop our spinal cord, has always been a black box. As the climate crisis tightens its grip, and the ecological ground beneath our feet grows ever more unsteady, the imperative to pry it open and peer inside grows more urgent by the day. Already, we’ve begun to glimpse the outlines of a new neural cartography, sketched in broad strokes by the likes of Sisodiya and his colleagues. We know now that the brain is less a static lump of self-regulating tissue than it is a dynamic, living landscape, its hills and valleys shaped by the contours of our environment. Just as the Greenland ice sheet groans and buckles under the heat of a changing climate, so too do our synapses wither and our neurons wink out as the mercury rises. Just as rising seas swallow coastlines, and forests succumb to drought and flame, the anatomical borders of our brains are redrawn by each new onslaught of environmental insult.

But the dialogue between brain and biosphere is not a one-way street. The choices we make, the behaviours we pursue, the ways in which we navigate a world in crisis – all of these decisions are reflected back onto the environment, for good or for ill. So, I offer: in seeking to understand how a changing climate moulds the contours of our minds, we must also reckon with how the architecture of our thoughts might be renovated in service of sustainability.

Bit by bit, synapse by synapse, we can chart a course through the gathering plague-cloud

The cartographers of the Anthropocene mind have their work cut out for them. But in the hands of neuroscience – with its shimmering brain scans and humming electrodes, its gene-editing precision and algorithmic might – there is something approaching a starting point. By tracing the pathways of environmental impact to their neural roots, and by following the cascading consequences of our mental processes back out into the world, we might yet begin to parse the tangled web that binds the fates of mind and planet.

This much is clear: as the gears of the climate crisis grind on, our brains will be swept along for the ride. The question is whether we’ll be mere passengers, or whether we’ll seize the controls and steer towards something resembling a liveable future. The weight of nature – the immensity of the crisis we face – is daunting. But it need not be paralysing. Bit by bit, synapse by synapse, we can chart a course through the gathering plague-clouds. It was Ruskin, at a slightly more legible moment in his life, who offered: ‘To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality.’ Even if we somehow could, we ought not banish the alleged imperfections of environmental influence on the mind. Instead, we ought to read in them an intimate, vital relationship between self and world.

In this, climatological neuroepidemiology – young and untested though it may be – is poised to play an outsized role. In gazing into the black box of the climate-altered mind, in illuminating the neural circuitry of our planetary predicament, the field offers something precious: a flicker of agency in a world that often feels as if it’s spinning out of control. It whispers that the levers of change are within reach, lodged in the squishy confines of our crania, waiting to be grasped. And it suggests that, even as the weight of nature presses down upon us, we might yet find a way to press back.

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C L R James and America

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Harvey Neptune

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Progress and modernity

The great wealth wave

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Daniel Waldenström

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Falling for suburbia

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The new climate narrative

Subscribe to global connection, kemal derviş kemal derviş senior fellow.

June 7, 2021

This op-ed was originally published by Project Syndicate .

As the Nobel laureate economists Robert Shiller , Abhijit Banerjee , and Esther Duflo have argued eloquently in recent books , political debate and economic policy are driven much more by simple “narratives” than by complex and nuanced theories or models. What counts are plausible “stories” that have broad intuitive appeal and can thus sway public opinion.

This is certainly true of climate policy. Modeling global warming is an immensely complicated undertaking based on “probabilistic” physical relationships and huge amounts of data about natural and human activities over many decades or centuries . But relatively straightforward messages continue to dominate policy discussions.

When the climate policy debate began, the prevailing narrative was that economic growth faced a new constraint in the form of a carbon budget, and exceeding it would bring about an undesirable amount of global warming. Policymakers would therefore have to consider a trade-off between more economic output in the near term and the damage caused by global warming in the longer term.

What previously appeared to be a political suicide mission could now yield substantial benefits for those who lead it.

Unsurprisingly, the academic debate—epitomized by the work of Nicholas Stern , William Nordhaus , and Martin Weitzman —concentrated heavily on how to compare climate-change mitigation costs paid in the present with benefits accrued in the future. The so-called “ social discount rate ” depends on two components: a rate of “pure time preference” that generally gives future generations’ welfare less weight than that of current ones (although some believe that ethical considerations require it to be zero), and a term reflecting the degree of diminishing returns to welfare with respect to consumption. A higher discount rate makes ambitious near-term mitigation policies appear less desirable.

Another dimension of the story was the fact that climate-change mitigation is a textbook example of a global public good. Because there is only one atmosphere, any country’s emissions reductions cause the same reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide and therefore the same mitigation, from which no country can be excluded. This gives rise to a free-rider problem: Every country has an incentive to let others mitigate, and thereby reap the benefits without incurring the costs.

Besides the discount rate, therefore, much of the climate debate centered on how to deal with the free-rider issue—for example, by trying to negotiate a binding international agreement tying rewards and penalties to mitigation performance. The bottom line was that limiting climate change was necessary but involved some important upfront costs that would—for a while at least—result in lower growth.

Changing the narrative of climate change

Social identity, not scientific evidence, drives many people’s attitudes on climate change.

The Orroral Valley fire burns near Canberra, 31 January 2020 (Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images)

Australian Public Opinion
Climate change

Few people would recognise respiratory failure as a critical threat to their health without also placing Covid-19 – an amplifier of respiratory failure – in the same category. Yet, this is essentially the way many Australians view climate change and its impacts, according to the 2020 Lowy Institute Poll .

While “drought and water shortages” and “environmental disasters such as bushfires and floods” are considered critical threats by 77% and 67% of the Australian population, respectively, only 59% say the same of climate change. We know that global warming is amplifying Australia’s risk of severe drought and bushfires along with other extreme weather events and rising sea levels. This disconnect presents us with a puzzle.

If we are fearful of those threats, logic would suggest we should seek to minimise them. The world’s best expertise has told us that if we want to minimise the threat of drought and bushfire, we need to take action on climate change .

Why, then, do we rate amplified symptoms as more threatening than the very causes for their amplification? Part of the answer lies in how we perceive threats. Humans are prone to appraising threats based on their availability to our minds, meaning we will rate threats we can perceive or recall as more urgent than those we cannot. The ability to remember the experience of drought and bushfire, versus needing to imagine the nebulous and multifaceted climate change, is an important factor.

We are not ideological partisans – we are expressive partisans seeking belonging and coherence with our identity group and cultivating points of hostility to and difference from outsiders.

But that’s not the whole story. For the vast majority of people in Australia, just as in many other nations , climate change is not an issue of science. Instead, climate change is a social object . As a social object, it is something we come to understand through our interactions in our social worlds and via observing discourse in the mass-mediated public sphere. Climate change occupies our minds not as the latest synthesis of the best available evidence from the IPCC , but as a narrative about causes, effects and solutions produced by our conversations with family and friends, our observations of the media and politics, and our exchanges on social media.

The Lowy Institute Poll nicely illustrates archetypical climate narratives . If your climate narrative is “Global warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs”, chances are high you read the drought, fires, smoke and hail during the horror summer of 2019–20 as the latest chapter in Australia’s experience of the effects of climate change. During the fires, it seemed there was no place left for narratives of climate action delay and science denial. But sure enough, those narratives emerged. The #ClimateEmergency narrative was challenged by the #ArsonEmergency , despite no evidence to support the latter.

Why were some Australians so eager to adopt the so-called arson emergency as their narrative explaining the fires? US political scientist Deva Woodly’s insights on resonance suggest a way to understand. By this concept, new information, if it is to stick and become part of our narrative, must resonate with what we already know – our “common-sense” understanding of the world.

If our common-sense understanding of the world is that “the problem of global warming should be addressed, but its effects will be gradual, so we can deal with the problem gradually by taking steps that are low in cost”, then the idea of the fires as a catalyst for revolution in Australian climate politics and policy is unlikely to resonate. But the fires as a crisis spurred by individual bad actors probably will. And for those folks, the “arson emergency” narrative allows climate change to remain a comparatively minor threat, compared to the threats it amplifies, despite the horror fires.

We must also recognise that climate narratives are not randomly distributed across the Australian population. In Australia, acceptance of the reality of climate change divides along left-right political lines – the intensity of left-right political polarisation on climate change is second only to the United States . So, our climate narratives are closely wrapped up not just in our social worlds, but also in our political worlds, and they come to be part of our identity . Our climate narrative signals the social groups to which we belong, just as our signals of social belonging can indicate our climate narrative.

For many people, climate narratives are far less connected to appraisal of the science of climate change than they are to expressing social belonging in relation to climate change. We are not ideological partisans – we are expressive partisans seeking belonging and coherence with our identity group and cultivating points of hostility to and difference from outsiders.

If we are to see better alignment between the best available scientific evidence and how Australians gauge the threat of climate change to the nation’s interest, we have to recognise that climate narratives are deeply intertwined with our social-political identities. New understandings will only stick if they resonate with existing narratives. And existing narratives are most likely to change if led from within the identity group.

To that end, we can look to groups that are advocating for climate action from outside of the “usual suspects”, such as Farmers for Climate Action , the Investor Group on Climate Change , the Hunter Jobs Alliance , and the Blueprint Institute . These are the social spaces in which a reorientation of climate narratives may occur.

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Our Future Is Now - A Climate Change Essay by Francesca Minicozzi, '21

Francesca Minicozzi (class of 2021) is a Writing/Biology major who plans to study medicine after graduation. She wrote this essay on climate change for WR 355/Travel Writing, which she took while studying abroad in Newcastle in spring 2020. Although the coronavirus pandemic curtailed Francesca’s time abroad, her months in Newcastle prompted her to learn more about climate change. Terre Ryan Associate Professor, Writing Department

Our Future Is Now

By Francesca Minicozzi, '21 Writing and Biology Major

“If you don’t mind me asking, how is the United States preparing for climate change?” my flat mate, Zac, asked me back in March, when we were both still in Newcastle. He and I were accustomed to asking each other about the differences between our home countries; he came from Cambridge, while I originated in Long Island, New York. This was one of our numerous conversations about issues that impact our generation, which we usually discussed while cooking dinner in our communal kitchen. In the moment of our conversation, I did not have as strong an answer for him as I would have liked. Instead, I informed him of the few changes I had witnessed within my home state of New York.

Zac’s response was consistent with his normal, diplomatic self. “I have been following the BBC news in terms of the climate crisis for the past few years. The U.K. has been working hard to transition to renewable energy sources. Similar to the United States, here in the United Kingdom we have converted over to solar panels too. My home does not have solar panels, but a lot of our neighbors have switched to solar energy in the past few years.”

“Our two countries are similar, yet so different,” I thought. Our conversation continued as we prepared our meals, with topics ranging from climate change to the upcoming presidential election to Britain’s exit from the European Union. However, I could not shake the fact that I knew so little about a topic so crucial to my generation.

After I abruptly returned home from the United Kingdom because of the global pandemic, my conversation with my flat mate lingered in my mind. Before the coronavirus surpassed climate change headlines, I had seen the number of internet postings regarding protests to protect the planet dramatically increase. Yet the idea of our planet becoming barren and unlivable in a not-so-distant future had previously upset me to the point where a part of me refused to deal with it. After I returned from studying abroad, I decided to educate myself on the climate crisis.

My quest for climate change knowledge required a thorough understanding of the difference between “climate change” and “global warming.” Climate change is defined as “a pattern of change affecting global or regional climate,” based on “average temperature and rainfall measurements” as well as the frequency of extreme weather events. 1 These varied temperature and weather events link back to both natural incidents and human activity. 2 Likewise, the term global warming was coined “to describe climate change caused by humans.” 3 Not only that, but global warming is most recently attributed to an increase in “global average temperature,” mainly due to greenhouse gas emissions produced by humans. 4

I next questioned why the term “climate change” seemed to take over the term “global warming” in the United States. According to Frank Luntz, a leading Republican consultant, the term “global warming” functions as a rather intimidating phrase. During George W. Bush’s first presidential term, Luntz argued in favor of using the less daunting phrase “climate change” in an attempt to overcome the environmental battle amongst Democrats and Republicans. 5 Since President Bush’s term, Luntz remains just one political consultant out of many politicians who has recognized the need to address climate change. In an article from 2019, Luntz proclaimed that political parties aside, the climate crisis affects everyone. Luntz argued that politicians should steer clear of trying to communicate “the complicated science of climate change,” and instead engage voters by explaining how climate change personally impacts citizens with natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and forest fires. 6 He even suggested that a shift away from words like “sustainability” would gear Americans towards what they really want: a “cleaner, safer, healthier” environment. 7

The idea of a cleaner and heathier environment remains easier said than done. The Paris Climate Agreement, introduced in 2015, began the United Nations’ “effort to combat global climate change.” 8 This agreement marked a global initiative to “limit global temperature increase in this century to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels,” while simultaneously “pursuing means to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees.” 9 Every country on earth has joined together in this agreement for the common purpose of saving our planet. 10 So, what could go wrong here? As much as this sounds like a compelling step in the right direction for climate change, President Donald Trump thought otherwise. In June 2017, President Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement with his proclamation of climate change as a “’hoax’ perpetrated by China.” 11 President Trump continued to question the scientific facts behind climate change, remaining an advocate for the expansion of domestic fossil fuel production. 12 He reversed environmental policies implemented by former President Barack Obama to reduce fossil fuel use. 13

Trump’s actions against the Paris Agreement, however, fail to represent the beliefs of Americans as a whole. The majority of American citizens feel passionate about the fight against climate change. To demonstrate their support, some have gone as far as creating initiatives including America’s Pledge and We Are Still In. 14 Although the United States officially exited the Paris Agreement on November 4, 2020, this withdrawal may not survive permanently. 15 According to experts, our new president “could rejoin in as short as a month’s time.” 16 This offers a glimmer of hope.

The Paris Agreement declares that the United States will reduce greenhouse gas emission levels by 26 to 28 percent by the year 2025. 17 As a leader in greenhouse gas emissions, the United States needs to accept the climate crisis for the serious challenge that it presents and work together with other nations. The concept of working coherently with all nations remains rather tricky; however, I remain optimistic. I think we can learn from how other countries have adapted to the increased heating of our planet. During my recent study abroad experience in the United Kingdom, I was struck by Great Britain’s commitment to combating climate change.

Since the United Kingdom joined the Paris Agreement, the country targets a “net-zero” greenhouse gas emission for 2050. 18 This substantial alteration would mark an 80% reduction of greenhouse gases from 1990, if “clear, stable, and well-designed policies are implemented without interruption.” 19 In order to stay on top of reducing emissions, the United Kingdom tracks electricity and car emissions, “size of onshore and offshore wind farms,” amount of homes and “walls insulated, and boilers upgraded,” as well as the development of government policies, including grants for electric vehicles. 20 A strong grip on this data allows the United Kingdom to target necessary modifications that keep the country on track for 2050. In my brief semester in Newcastle, I took note of these significant changes. The city of Newcastle is small enough that many students and faculty are able to walk or bike to campus and nearby essential shops. However, when driving is unavoidable, the majority of the vehicles used are electric, and many British citizens place a strong emphasis on carpooling to further reduce emissions. The United Kingdom’s determination to severely reduce greenhouse emissions is ambitious and particularly admirable, especially as the United States struggles to shy away from its dependence on fossil fuels.

So how can we, as Americans, stand together to combat global climate change? Here are five adjustments Americans can make to their homes and daily routines that can dramatically make a difference:

Stay cautious of food waste. Studies demonstrate that “Americans throw away up to 40 percent of the food they buy.” 21 By being more mindful of the foods we purchase, opting for leftovers, composting wastes, and donating surplus food to those in need, we can make an individual difference that impacts the greater good. 22
Insulate your home. Insulation functions as a “cost-effective and accessible” method to combat climate change. 23 Homes with modern insulation reduce energy required to heat them, leading to a reduction of emissions and an overall savings; in comparison, older homes can “lose up to 35 percent of heat through their walls.” 24
Switch to LED Lighting. LED stands for “light-emitting diodes,” which use “90 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs and half as much as compact fluorescents.” 25 LED lights create light without producing heat, and therefore do not waste energy. Additionally, these lights have a longer duration than other bulbs, which means they offer a continuing savings. 26
Choose transportation wisely. Choose to walk or bike whenever the option presents itself. If walking or biking is not an option, use an electric or hybrid vehicle which emits less harmful gases. Furthermore, reduce the number of car trips taken, and carpool with others when applicable.
Finally, make your voice heard. The future of our planet remains in our hands, so we might as well use our voices to our advantage. Social media serves as a great platform for this. Moreover, using social media to share helpful hints to combat climate change within your community or to promote an upcoming protest proves beneficial in the long run. If we collectively put our voices to good use, together we can advocate for change.

As many of us are stuck at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these suggestions are slightly easier to put into place. With numerous “stay-at-home” orders in effect, Americans have the opportunity to make significant achievements for climate change. Personally, I have taken more precautions towards the amount of food consumed within my household during this pandemic. I have been more aware of food waste, opting for leftovers when too much food remains. Additionally, I have realized how powerful my voice is as a young college student. Now is the opportunity for Americans to share how they feel about climate change. During this unprecedented time, our voice is needed now more than ever in order to make a difference.

However, on a much larger scale, the coronavirus outbreak has shed light on reducing global energy consumption. Reductions in travel, both on the roads and in the air, have triggered a drop in emission rates. In fact, the International Energy Agency predicts a 6 percent decrease in energy consumption around the globe for this year alone. 27 This drop is “equivalent to losing the entire energy demand of India.” 28 Complete lockdowns have lowered the global demand for electricity and slashed CO2 emissions. However, in New York City, the shutdown has only decreased carbon dioxide emissions by 10 percent. 29 This proves that a shift in personal behavior is simply not enough to “fix the carbon emission problem.” 30 Climate policies aimed to reduce fossil fuel production and promote clean technology will be crucial steppingstones to ameliorating climate change effects. Our current reduction of greenhouse gas emissions serves as “the sort of reduction we need every year until net-zero emissions are reached around 2050.” 31 From the start of the coronavirus pandemic, politicians came together for the common good of protecting humanity; this demonstrates that when necessary, global leaders are capable of putting humankind above the economy. 32

After researching statistics comparing the coronavirus to climate change, I thought back to the moment the virus reached pandemic status. I knew that a greater reason underlay all of this global turmoil. Our globe is in dire need of help, and the coronavirus reminds the world of what it means to work together. This pandemic marks a turning point in global efforts to slow down climate change. The methods we enact towards not only stopping the spread of the virus, but slowing down climate change, will ultimately depict how humanity will arise once this pandemic is suppressed. The future of our home planet lies in how we treat it right now.

“Climate Change: What Do All the Terms Mean?,” BBC News (BBC, May 1, 2019), https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48057733 )
Ibid.
Kate Yoder, “Frank Luntz, the GOP's Message Master, Calls for Climate Action,” Grist (Grist, July 26, 2019), https://grist.org/article/the-gops-most-famous-messaging-strategist-calls-for-climate-action
Melissa Denchak, “Paris Climate Agreement: Everything You Need to Know,” NRDC, April 29, 2020, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/paris-climate-agreement-everything-you-need-know)
“Donald J. Trump's Foreign Policy Positions,” Council on Foreign Relations (Council on Foreign Relations), accessed May 7, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/election2020/candidate-tracker/donald-j.-trump?gclid=CjwKCAjw4871BRAjEiwAbxXi21cneTRft_doA5if60euC6QCL7sr-Jwwv76IkgWaUTuyJNx9EzZzRBoCdjsQAvD_BwE#climate and energy )
David Doniger, “Paris Climate Agreement Explained: Does Congress Need to Sign Off?,” NRDC, December 15, 2016, https://www.nrdc.org/experts/david-doniger/paris-climate-agreement-explained-does-congress-need-sign )
“How the UK Is Progressing,” Committee on Climate Change, March 9, 2020, https://www.theccc.org.uk/what-is-climate-change/reducing-carbon-emissions/how-the-uk-is-progressing/)
Ibid.
“Top 10 Ways You Can Fight Climate Change,” Green America, accessed May 7, 2020, https://www.greenamerica.org/your-green-life/10-ways-you-can-fight-climate-change )
Matt McGrath, “Climate Change and Coronavirus: Five Charts about the Biggest Carbon Crash,” BBC News (BBC, May 5, 2020), https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/science-environment-52485712 )

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Changing the Narrative around a Changing Climate

Ashley Bieniek-Tobasco, BS ’11, MPH ’13, DrPH

Environmental scientist at icf.

October 24, 2019

When you think about climate change, you probably think first of images of starving animals, melting glaciers, and political discord.

This now-iconic imagery dominates the way we think of and talk about our relationship to climate change. Common climate change narratives paint a picture of a near post-apocalyptic world where extreme weather and human and animal suffering are prevalent and where we have missed the opportunity to take meaningful action. Recent examples of this in popular media include a New York Times Magazine issue titled “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” a National Geographic video of a starving polar bear, and graphic imagery of walrus overcrowding in the Netflix series Our Planet . 1

But do fear-inducing representations of climate change encourage people to take action?

Likely not so much. Such fear-based narratives are known to raise public concern and generate interest, but only to a point. Too much fear can make us feel overwhelmed. If the goal of such tactics is to scare people into taking action , research shows that even the most concerned exhibit limited participation in political activism 2 and that high-risk perceptions are not sufficient to motivate action. 3

Climate change messaging often leaves out efficacy-building information.

Perhaps more dangerously, such tactics fail to expose us to and teach us about the climate change impacts we most likely will encounter in our daily lives, including extreme-heat-related health risks, coastal and inland flooding events, wildfires, and extreme storms, among many others. 4

Climate change messaging also often leaves out the critical component of efficacy-building information. This type of information provides positive ideas about how individuals can make a difference and what their actions can achieve. Efficacy is an important part of making fear appeals effective. 5 But in practice, climate change messages have often failed to strike a balance between fear and efficacy, even amid suggestions that fear be employed with caution. 6

One piece of good news is the growing talk about climate change in popular culture using a storytelling approach. Recent examples include documentaries like Years of Living Dangerously, Before the Flood, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, and the aforementioned Our Planet. This emphasis on storytelling is encouraging because narrative forms of communication can generate complex emotional responses and immersive experiences, which can make a story more interesting, engaging, and persuasive than more didactic forms of communication. 7

Beyond the power to convince, a good story can also generate conversation. Think about the times you wanted to discuss the latest season of Stranger Things or Game of Thrones with your friends. Or the time you called your family to ask if they just watched 60 Minutes too. Or when you take part in any number of good stories we tell each other in books, on screens, and in person. Today, such conversations happen regularly on social media—where hashtags allow thousands to participate in a single conversation.

As it stands, few people discuss climate change on a regular basis. Fortunately, story-generated discussions have the potential to elevate climate change in our national discourse. And the more that people in your network talk about climate change, the more likely you are to have pro-climate attitudes. 8

Media makers looking to tell more climate stories, generate discussion, and stimulate action need to be wary of stoking fear without empowering. Too many of the same images of “climate change”—starving polar bears and tumbling walruses—can lead people to the conclusion that the problem is too big, too distant, and too late to fix . Stories that cultivate fear but do not include information about what a person can do to make a difference may stifle action rather than encourage it 9 and may lead to feelings of being manipulated to feel a certain way. 10

As the influence of popular media on the climate change conversation grows, we need more research about which climate change stories resonate most with audiences to foster engagement with this complex issue. Stories, the imagery in them, and the people sharing them can be engaging, disengaging, or even polarizing. Understanding what message and which spokesperson will connect with which audiences is paramount. Highlighting people and stories that inspire and encourage tangible action is critical to creating impactful, catalyzing messages around climate change.

Public health communicators and our partners across the sciences have an opportunity and responsibility to shift climate conversations from messages of doom-and-gloom to narratives of hope, empowerment, and action. Good storytelling will be a significant tool in elevating the importance of climate change in personal and national discourses. You can start by talking to your neighbors, friends, or family about how you are experiencing climate change. By highlighting stories of real people and their challenges, successes, progress, and meaningful action, we can exercise our own agency—as public health communicators—in protecting the environment and the communities we inhabit.

“Rich, Nathaniel, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” New York Times (August 1, 2018); National Geographic magazine, August 2018; Season 1, episode 2, of Our Planet on Netflix.
Leiserowitz, Anthony, et al., Americans’ Actions to Limit Global Warming , November 2013. Based on findings from Climate Change in the American Mind , a national survey conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.
Roser-Renouf, Connie, et al., “The Genesis of Climate Change Activism: From Key Beliefs to Political Action,” Climatic Change 125/2 (July 2014): 163–178.
Fourth National Climate Assessment , US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) 2018, nca2018.globalchange.gov
Witte, Kim, and Mike Allen, “A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals: Implications for Effective Public Health Campaigns,” Health Education and Behavior 27/5 (October 2000): 591-615.
O’Neill, Saffron, and Sophie Nicholson-Cole, “Fear Won’t Do It: Promoting Positive Engagement with Climate Change through Visual and Iconic Representations,” Journal of Science Communication 30/3 (2009): 355-379.
Kreuter et al., Annals of Behavioral Medicine 33/3 (June 2007): 221–235; Shaffer et al., On the Usefulness of Narratives: An Interdisciplinary Review and Theoretical Model, Annals of Behavioral Medicine 52/5 (May 2018): 429-442; Morris, Brandi S., et al., “Stories vs. Facts: Triggering Emotion and Action-Taking on Climate Change,” Climatic Change 154/1-2 (May 2019): 19–36.
Ballew, Matthew, et al., “Climate Change in the American Mind: Data, Tools, and Trends,” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 61/3 (2019):4-18.
Witte and Allen, “Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals,” 2000.
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Table Of Contents

Human activity affects global surface temperatures by changing Earth ’s radiative balance—the “give and take” between what comes in during the day and what Earth emits at night. Increases in greenhouse gases —i.e., trace gases such as carbon dioxide and methane that absorb heat energy emitted from Earth’s surface and reradiate it back—generated by industry and transportation cause the atmosphere to retain more heat, which increases temperatures and alters precipitation patterns.

Global warming, the phenomenon of increasing average air temperatures near Earth’s surface over the past one to two centuries, happens mostly in the troposphere , the lowest level of the atmosphere, which extends from Earth’s surface up to a height of 6–11 miles. This layer contains most of Earth’s clouds and is where living things and their habitats and weather primarily occur.

Continued global warming is expected to impact everything from energy use to water availability to crop productivity throughout the world. Poor countries and communities with limited abilities to adapt to these changes are expected to suffer disproportionately. Global warming is already being associated with increases in the incidence of severe and extreme weather, heavy flooding , and wildfires —phenomena that threaten homes, dams, transportation networks, and other facets of human infrastructure. Learn more about how the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, released in 2021, describes the social impacts of global warming.

Polar bears live in the Arctic , where they use the region’s ice floes as they hunt seals and other marine mammals . Temperature increases related to global warming have been the most pronounced at the poles, where they often make the difference between frozen and melted ice. Polar bears rely on small gaps in the ice to hunt their prey. As these gaps widen because of continued melting, prey capture has become more challenging for these animals.

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global warming , the phenomenon of increasing average air temperatures near the surface of Earth over the past one to two centuries. Climate scientists have since the mid-20th century gathered detailed observations of various weather phenomena (such as temperatures, precipitation , and storms) and of related influences on climate (such as ocean currents and the atmosphere’s chemical composition). These data indicate that Earth’s climate has changed over almost every conceivable timescale since the beginning of geologic time and that human activities since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution have a growing influence over the pace and extent of present-day climate change .

Giving voice to a growing conviction of most of the scientific community , the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), published in 2021, noted that the best estimate of the increase in global average surface temperature between 1850 and 2019 was 1.07 °C (1.9 °F). An IPCC special report produced in 2018 noted that human beings and their activities have been responsible for a worldwide average temperature increase between 0.8 and 1.2 °C (1.4 and 2.2 °F) since preindustrial times, and most of the warming over the second half of the 20th century could be attributed to human activities.

AR6 produced a series of global climate predictions based on modeling five greenhouse gas emission scenarios that accounted for future emissions, mitigation (severity reduction) measures, and uncertainties in the model projections. Some of the main uncertainties include the precise role of feedback processes and the impacts of industrial pollutants known as aerosols , which may offset some warming. The lowest-emissions scenario, which assumed steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions beginning in 2015, predicted that the global mean surface temperature would increase between 1.0 and 1.8 °C (1.8 and 3.2 °F) by 2100 relative to the 1850–1900 average. This range stood in stark contrast to the highest-emissions scenario, which predicted that the mean surface temperature would rise between 3.3 and 5.7 °C (5.9 and 10.2 °F) by 2100 based on the assumption that greenhouse gas emissions would continue to increase throughout the 21st century. The intermediate-emissions scenario, which assumed that emissions would stabilize by 2050 before declining gradually, projected an increase of between 2.1 and 3.5 °C (3.8 and 6.3 °F) by 2100.

Many climate scientists agree that significant societal, economic, and ecological damage would result if the global average temperature rose by more than 2 °C (3.6 °F) in such a short time. Such damage would include increased extinction of many plant and animal species, shifts in patterns of agriculture , and rising sea levels. By 2015 all but a few national governments had begun the process of instituting carbon reduction plans as part of the Paris Agreement , a treaty designed to help countries keep global warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preindustrial levels in order to avoid the worst of the predicted effects. Whereas authors of the 2018 special report noted that should carbon emissions continue at their present rate, the increase in average near-surface air temperature would reach 1.5 °C sometime between 2030 and 2052, authors of the AR6 report suggested that this threshold would be reached by 2041 at the latest.

Combination shot of Grinnell Glacier taken from the summit of Mount Gould, Glacier National Park, Montana in the years 1938, 1981, 1998 and 2006.

The AR6 report also noted that the global average sea level had risen by some 20 cm (7.9 inches) between 1901 and 2018 and that sea level rose faster in the second half of the 20th century than in the first half. It also predicted, again depending on a wide range of scenarios, that the global average sea level would rise by different amounts by 2100 relative to the 1995–2014 average. Under the report’s lowest-emission scenario, sea level would rise by 28–55 cm (11–21.7 inches), whereas, under the intermediate emissions scenario, sea level would rise by 44–76 cm (17.3–29.9 inches). The highest-emissions scenario suggested that sea level would rise by 63–101 cm (24.8–39.8 inches) by 2100.

The scenarios referred to above depend mainly on future concentrations of certain trace gases, called greenhouse gases , that have been injected into the lower atmosphere in increasing amounts through the burning of fossil fuels for industry, transportation , and residential uses. Modern global warming is the result of an increase in magnitude of the so-called greenhouse effect , a warming of Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere caused by the presence of water vapour , carbon dioxide , methane , nitrous oxides , and other greenhouse gases. In 2014 the IPCC first reported that concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxides in the atmosphere surpassed those found in ice cores dating back 800,000 years.

Of all these gases, carbon dioxide is the most important, both for its role in the greenhouse effect and for its role in the human economy. It has been estimated that, at the beginning of the industrial age in the mid-18th century, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were roughly 280 parts per million (ppm). By the end of 2022 they had risen to 419 ppm, and, if fossil fuels continue to be burned at current rates, they are projected to reach 550 ppm by the mid-21st century—essentially, a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in 300 years.

What's the problem with an early spring?

A vigorous debate is in progress over the extent and seriousness of rising surface temperatures, the effects of past and future warming on human life, and the need for action to reduce future warming and deal with its consequences. This article provides an overview of the scientific background related to the subject of global warming. It considers the causes of rising near-surface air temperatures, the influencing factors, the process of climate research and forecasting, and the possible ecological and social impacts of rising temperatures. For an overview of the public policy developments related to global warming occurring since the mid-20th century, see global warming policy . For a detailed description of Earth’s climate, its processes, and the responses of living things to its changing nature, see climate . For additional background on how Earth’s climate has changed throughout geologic time , see climatic variation and change . For a full description of Earth’s gaseous envelope, within which climate change and global warming occur, see atmosphere .

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Turning Climate Crisis Stories Into Narrative of the Future, Changed but Still Beautiful

Writers Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams offer new perspectives on how to remake the world

By Alvin Powell, The Harvard Gazette

Stories can drive action, but perhaps the most damaging climate change story we can tell is the tall tale that we can simply opt for the stability and safety of the status quo, writer and activist Rebecca Solnit said Wednesday evening at Harvard’s Memorial Church.

That’s because there is no status quo, as the effects of climate change are multiplying around us, Solnit said. And those changes are going to keep coming — and worsening — regardless of the path we take. The choice is between the uncertainty of a transition from fossil fuels that results in more manageable changes or to continue on the path we’re on, fostering what are likely to be more sweeping and dangerous disruptions.

Solnit, the author of 24 books, including the recently released anthology “Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility,” spoke as part of Harvard Divinity School ’s Climate Justice Week, designed to promote thinking around climate justice and highlight the roles that religion and spirituality play in the conversation. The event, “Stories Are Cages, Stories Are Wings — So What Stories Do We Tell About Climate?,” featured Solnit in conversation with Terry Tempest Williams , Divinity School writer-in-residence, as well as a poetry reading and a musical performance of Beethoven.

“Like the chassis of a car or the framing of a house or the skeleton of our own body, assumptions lurk under the stories we tell, giving them their structure or limiting the shapes they can take,” Solnit said. “And one of the biggest, wrongest ones that seems to shape — or misshape — the collective imagination is this idea that there’s an option not to change, and that change is just something we should aspire to or demand, that there’s some sort of stability we can choose instead of changing everything.”

Solnit, who spoke for about 30 minutes and took questions afterward, was described by Williams as “singular, original, defiant, and loving.” Through her work, which spans human rights, women’s rights, the environment, and climate change, Solnit is “building a constituency for change,” Williams said. That effort is continuing with her latest book, “Not Too Late,” which seeks to combat climate change despair and defeatism with stories of hope and change.

Another damaging idea, Williams said in her talk, is that we have to have a perfect solution before we act. People hold up the promise of energy generation by nuclear fusion — the clean source that powers the sun — or of carbon capture and sequestration technology, which will permit continued fossil fuel burning by stripping and storing carbon dioxide from emissions, as ideals that will cause much less disruption to the current energy system.

But Solnit cautioned against letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Instead of waiting for those technologies to mature, she said, we should take advantage of the solutions available now. There has been a revolution in renewable energy in recent decades, with efficiency climbing and prices dropping for solar and wind power to the extent that wind is supplanting coal in the Texas energy grid on the basis of price alone.

Addressing climate change, she said, may best be viewed not as merely achieving a goal, but rather as embarking on a process, one that will best get us where we’re going if we start now, using the tools we have at hand. That means embracing renewables and widespread electrification and then adjusting as we go, as newer, better tools become available.

No solution is perfect, however, including renewable energy sources, which have been criticized because of the mining practices employed in extracting chemicals important for battery production to store the energy. While a real problem, that doesn’t invalidate a strategy that still has significantly lower impact than fossil fuel extraction, Solnit said.

“We don’t know how to get there, but we know to take the next step and the next step,” Solnit said, quoting E.L. Doctorow’s description of writing as an apt analogy: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

A key element of the trip into our climate-changed future, Solnit said, is that it should be taken together. Those who resist change would like us to focus on ourselves, on our individual carbon footprints, despairing of achieving broader change.

But Solnit said the complexity of the world’s natural systems means climate change is, by its nature, a problem of networks and connectedness. Viewing climate change as a collective problem requiring cooperation, imagination, and creativity, she said, gives us the power to devise solutions that lift up those who are disadvantaged in the present, like the billions of global poor, living in places most likely to feel climate-related impacts.

Solnit invoked the Japanese art of kintsugi as an analogy for the future. Kintsugi repairs broken pottery not to its original functionality or appearance, but rather uses golden glue to highlight the breaks, enhance the beauty, and transform the piece into something different, but nonetheless valuable.

“I think that there’s a tendency to think that when something is broken, all it will ever be is shards,” Solnit said. “I’ve used it as a metaphor: Life will happen to you. You won’t be young forever. Sorrow will carve its pattern on our face. If you live, if you love, you will lose. But it can still be beautiful, still be strong, and go forward. The bowl can still hold something. The person can still find beauty, find meaning, have strength.”

Today, Solnit said, we don’t need stories of “the climate crisis” so much as we need stories of meeting the crisis, stories that reframe our view of the decades to come in a way similar to reassembling broken ceramics into something else, something perhaps more beautiful.

“I say to you we are making a new world and I believe it can be, in crucial ways, a better one,” Solnit said.

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Published: 23 October 2015

A unified narrative for climate change

Simon Bushell ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6759-4462 1 ,
Thomas Colley 2 &
Mark Workman 3

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Transformative narratives for climate action

Published: 20 June 2020
Volume 160 , pages 495–506, ( 2020 )

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1 Introduction

Arguably, a doom and gloom narrative , which emphasizes problems, costs and adverse impacts, is the most dominant narrative about climate change. Narratives are socially constructed “stories” that make sense of events and phenomena, integrating them into worldviews (van der Leeuw 2019 ). By doing so, narratives shape preferences and opinions giving direction to human action (Fløttum and Gjerstad 2017 ). In the context of climate change, it is widely acknowledged that narratives, rather than climate information per se, play the decisive role in motivating or demotivating climate action (Chapman et al. 2017 ; Fløttum and Gjerstad 2017 ; Hulme 2009 ; Moser 2010 ). Consequently, there has been intense debate about whether the doom and gloom narrative is counterproductive for climate action as fear may demotivate climate action (Chapman et al. 2017 ). Conversely, narratives can also empower people to act upon problems such as climate change. In this context, Tàbara et al. ( 2018 ), for example, put forward the notion of transformative narratives , which are bottom-up narratives that tell a positive and engaging story, articulate a vision of “where we want to go” and provide solutions for attaining this vision, rather than articulating problems to avoid.

This special issue focuses on transformative narratives for climate action that highlight economic and other opportunities in climate action. The narratives have been co-developed and empirically validated in the GREEN-WIN project, an international transdisciplinary research collaboration supported by the EU from September 2015 to December 2018, which involved 16 project partners and 25 supporting organisations from UN agencies, civil society, financial institutions, universities and think tanks around the world.

The transformative narratives developed are built around what we call win-win strategies (WWS), which are practicable solutions that provide near-term economic benefit to individual businesses, municipalities or countries, and at the same time contribute to meeting climate mitigation, adaptation and other sustainability goals. At the micro level, WWS include green business models and, at the macro level, green growth policies. An example of the latter is an investment-oriented climate policy that switches the European economy to a pathway with higher growth, lower unemployment and lower emissions (Tàbara et al. 2013 ).

The GREEN-WIN project investigated WWS in a range of diverse mitigation and adaptation cases at both micro and macro levels, and critically assessed the conditions under which WWS may be realized, transferred and up-scaled, and where fundamental trade-offs between climate and economic goals must be faced. At national levels, we investigated the feasibility of green growth through financial policy and technology transfer. At local levels, the project gathered empirical evidence on WWS and enabling environments for green businesses in the areas of coastal flood risk management, urban transformation, energy poverty and climate-resilient livelihoods. At both levels, we investigated financial instruments and policies, as well as financial system reforms that could redirect financial flows towards sustainability and climate action.

This editorial first reviews some of the main contemporary narratives for climate action and clarifies why we focus on transformative narratives (Section 2 ). Then it introduces the individual papers of this special issue (Section 3 ) and summarizes some of the key findings across the papers.

2 Climate action narratives

2.1 top-down doom and gloom narratives versus bottom-up transformative narratives.

Historically, the dominant narrative regarding climate action emphasised massive climate risks and “top-down” solutions of globally binding international agreements on emission reductions. This narrative was supported by mainstream climate change research and the traditional view of science-policy interactions based on the knowledge-deficit model (Simis et al. 2016 ). Climate research provides information to policy makers on the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, showing that today’s emissions will place a heavy burden on future generations, including increased occurrence of extreme weather events, rising sea levels, growing pressure on livelihoods, food production and health (IPCC 2015 ). Research results also show that while developed countries and some large economies in transition are the largest emitters, developing countries generally experience the most severe impacts.

This narrative provides strong ethical arguments for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and for assisting developing countries in meeting the costs of adaptation. And arguably, this narrative has been successful in helping to bring the climate issue onto political agendas, e.g. through the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The ethical arguments provided the impetus for countries to agree on ambitious climate mitigation targets and establish financial transfers from developed to developing countries. The recent Paris Agreement, in which the 195 UNFCCC member states agreed on the goal to limit global warming to “well below 2°C” (United Nations 2015 ), demonstrates a success in this pattern of science-policy interaction.

However, the top-down narrative was not successful in helping to deliver a globally binding agreement on national emission reductions. The 2009 Copenhagen Conference of Parties, which failed to achieve such a global agreement, illustrated the serious challenges associated with this narrative: reducing emissions was perceived to be costly, reducing competitiveness and slowing down national economic development. This resulted in understanding climate mitigation as a social dilemma, in which individual countries had the incentive to free ride on the costly emission reductions made by others. Hence, solving the climate issue was perceived as a matter of sharing the burden of emission reduction among countries and the only way of doing this would be binding agreement that explicitly divided global emissions into national contingents.

The 2015 Paris Agreement, however, witnessed the emergence of a different, bottom-up narrative emphasising voluntary contributions to climate action in terms of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) from each country. This acknowledges the difficult trade-offs countries may face between economic growth and climate action and puts a greater emphasis on solutions that resonate with the interests of individual countries. This bottom-up narrative, which emphasizes individual interests and advantages of climate action in terms of economic and sustainable development, is not new. On the contrary, it has been practised widely in the context of communities, e.g. in the form of community-based adaptation (Ayers and Forsyth 2009 ), and cities and regions, e.g. within the C40 Cities (Lee and van de Meene 2012 ), just to name two prominent variants. What is new is that this bottom-up approach has been accepted internationally at the level of the UNFCCC.

On the one hand, this new bottom-up narrative of international climate action seems promising. Opportunities or co-benefits of climate action are increasingly emphasized. For example, Europe announced its aspiration to become the first continent in the world to be carbon neutral in 2050 and launched a plan to mobilise at least 1 trillion investments through the European Green Deal (European Commission 2019 ). On the other hand, we still see a significant gap between the current Nationally Determined Contributions and the goals of limiting warming to “well-below 2°C”. Furthermore, it remains to be seen whether countries will comply with their voluntary commitments.

Despite the shift from top-down to bottom-up solutions, the doom and gloom narrative persists in large parts of climate policy, civil society debates, climate research literature and the media coverage thereof. This narrative has even received renewed attention through civil society movements such as “Fridays for the Future” and “Extinction Rebellion”, which emphasize the failure of public and collaborative governance in preventing the “climate catastrophe” (Extinction Rebellion 2019 ).

While climate scientists are debating whether doom and gloom messages about climate change can be effective in leading to action (Chapman et al. 2017 ), there is some evidence that this might be counterproductive in motivating climate action (Moser 2010 ; O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 2009 ). Research from social psychology, for example, shows that people are more reluctant to act on climate change if they are overwhelmed with negative information (Nelder 2013 ). Worse, narratives of fear can become self-fulfilling prophecies. A typical example exists in the role of expectations and fear in economics: if people believe that a recession is on its way, they behave as if it is already here, and through that actually can cause the recession without the presence of any objective factor driving the economy into recession (Azariadis 1981 ).

2.2 The green growth and degrowth narratives

Another narrative prominent in recent years is the green growth narrative (or green economy narrative). Green growth seems to be an attractive answer to the climate dilemma, because if green growth is possible, the global public good dilemma would disappear. Under green growth, single countries would be interested in reducing emissions for their own economic benefit and the global public good of a safe climate would be provided as a side effect of these individual actions.

It is no surprise, then, that this concept has gained wide popularity in the policy world. The vision of a green economy that “results in improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities” (UNEP 2011 , p. 6) has been adopted as a development strategy by leading international organisations such as the International Labour Organization, United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and many Asian and Pacific governments. Even more prominently, the green growth claim has become part of the Sustainable Development Goals Number 8, which calls “to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation” (UNDESA 2020 ).

But is green growth really possible or is it just an oxymoron that disguises business-as-usual development? And what are the actual implications of green growth in terms of distributional effects and employment? Existing literature argues that green growth is highly unlikely to succeed in stopping environmental degradation (Hickel and Kallis 2019 ; Jackson and Victor 2019 ; Parrique et al. 2019 ; Ward et al. 2016 ; Wiedmann et al. 2015 ) and empirical evidence demonstrates that economic growth is generally not decoupled from carbon emissions (Parrique et al. 2019 ; Zsyman et al. 2012 ). The same literature, however, also acknowledges that limited research, to date, has addressed this topic. Furthermore, little effort has been made to substantiate the concept through economic theory and applied economic modelling (Scrieciu et al. 2013 ).

A narrative that radically differs from the green growth narrative is the degrowth narrative , which questions the viability of continued economic growth and argues that the sustainable use of natural resources requires more fundamental changes to the organization of society, including substantial reductions in production and consumption levels (D’Alisa et al. 2014 ; Jackson 2013 ; Martínez-Alier et al. 2010 ). Proponents of this narrative see degrowth as the only possible way of addressing the root cause of environmental destruction, because a smaller economy requires fewer resources and creates less pollution. They further argue that rich countries appear to be exhausting the means to sustain economic growth over the long term, and thus the need to consider degrowth as an option is inevitable (Raworth 2017 ).

Despite the arguments in favour of degrowth, green growth continues to be the dominant narrative for environmental sustainability in policy, while degrowth is rarely considered, especially not at international levels. To a large extent, this results from today’s economies and power structures being closely tied to economic growth, and it is thus questionable if degrowth could deliver the large scale and urgent climate action needed today. Furthermore, empirical evidence shows that decreasing economic growth generally reduces employment and social equity and so far, there is little evidence on how a large scale degrowth transition can work without massive social disruption (Kallis et al. 2018 ; Martínez-Alier et al. 2010 ).

But in any case, both proponents of the green growth and degrowth narratives run the risk of reducing the sustainability discussion to a question of metrics (i.e. GDP), rather than focusing on the complexity of multiple dimensions, social processes and interests that drive societal development and the extent to which people cooperate in addressing social dilemma such as climate change. Trying to find empirical examples and new ways to frame the climate challenge in order to overcome the stereotypical debate between green growth and degrowth was one of the main aims of the GREEN-WIN project.

2.3 Transformative win-win narratives

The win-win narratives put forward by the GREEN-WIN project combine elements of the bottom-up, transformative narratives with a cautious version of the green growth narrative. They build on WWS, which are economically attractive to individual entrepreneurs, communities and whole economies on the temporal scale of their contemporary decisions, and address climate and sustainability goals at the same time. We argue that such WWS are needed for advancing climate action today for two reasons.

Firstly, the majority of countries, businesses and individuals around the globe are either unwilling or unable to sacrifice near-term economic development for emission reductions. Globally, 2.2 billion people lack safe drinking water (UNICEF 2019 ) and three-quarters of a billion people remain in extreme poverty, living below the international poverty line of US$1.90 per day (Global SDG Awards 2020 ). For these people, and the countries they live in, economic development is the only way forward. Also, for those countries that could in principle afford substantial emission reductions, compromising on economic growth is generally a no-go area. This is illustrated by the current debates in many countries around the world in which proposals for ambitious mitigation strategies are turned down with the argument that these would damage industries, lead to unemployment etc.

A second reason why WWS are necessary for advancing climate action today is that the implementation of climate action is often impeded by a range of behavioural, psychological, economic, financial and institutional barriers, and WWS are exactly what we need to overcome some of these barriers. Barriers are documented by a large and growing empirical literature both in the domains of adaptation (Chambwera et al. 2014 ; Dow et al. 2013 ; Eisenack et al. 2014 ; Klein et al. 2014 ; Moser and Ekstrom 2010 ) and mitigation (Brown et al. 2008 , p. 200; Rickards et al. 2014 ; Semenza et al. 2008 ). Many of those barriers relate to economic and financial issues. In the adaptation domain, for example, a lack of access to finance often prohibits the implementation of adaptation measures, even if those measures are economically beneficial (Hinkel et al. 2018 ). In the mitigation domain, climate action is often hindered because senior decision makers in government and business are narrowly focused on near-term issues (Rickards et al. 2014 ). WWS provide economic benefits today and hence are the means for enhancing access to finance, as well as channelling climate action considerations into near-term decision making. Furthermore, by taking into account diverse interests of all individual people, firms or countries, institutional barriers can be overcome.

We acknowledge that win-win narratives and WWS will not be sufficient for solving the climate problem, but they move the ball in the right direction and help to overcome barriers of climate action associated with narratives of fear and doom. It is possible that it will turn out that some WWS, implemented for some sectors and actors, may have negative effects on long-term sustainability for other actors or sectors. Hence, it is important to learn and correct courses of climate action as we go along. However, WWS can change the climate action narrative from one of burden sharing and doom and gloom to one of opportunities, which in turn can then trigger further climate action, including action that is not economically directly beneficial.

So far, little dedicated research has targeted the uncovering of win-win opportunities; therefore, investing in this kind of research is a timely endeavour. By saying this, we have no intention of saying that we should stop doing research that supports the ethical arguments or degrowth narratives as outlined above. On the contrary, the climate problem is so serious and complex that no one can honestly claim that any single strand of research can solve the climate problem. It is, however, timely to enhance research providing short-term economic arguments that have received little attention so far in climate research despite being critical for solving the climate problem. It is difficult to imagine that we can make any significant progress towards solving the climate problem without providing economic arguments for reducing emissions and opportunities for development that work today for individual countries, regions and entrepreneurs.

3 Papers in the special issue

The papers in the GREEN-WIN special issue cover a wide range of climate mitigation and adaptation action domains, both on the micro and macro levels and ranging from addressing theoretical issues on narratives and green growth to empirical case studies. We have clustered these papers into the following four thematic subsections.

3.1 Win-win strategies in the broader cultural and economic context

An initial set of papers set the stage for the special issue, situating win-win narratives in the broader cultural and economic context, providing key conceptual language for the understanding and analyses of WWS. In an essay exploring the role of narratives in human-environmental relations, Van der Leeuw ( 2019 ) argues that narratives are key for transitions to sustainability as they mediate social and individual perceptions of environmental phenomena and society’s role in influencing these. Narratives that enable a sustainability transition must be grounded in context-specific meaning to empower different groups around the world to engage in win-win climate solutions.

Thornton et al. ( 2019 ) study cultural models of the relationship between economic development and environmental outcomes. The authors survey 225 respondents in China, Lebanon and Turkey to elicit perspectives on whether growth and environmental quality are competing or complementary, finding that views on the existence of such trade-offs differ across locations. For example, respondents in China and Lebanon viewed green economic development as feasible, while those in Turkey were more pessimistic.

Meissner et al. ( 2019 ) develop a typology of WWS for climate mitigation and adaptation, by analysing diverse socioeconomic activities identified together with stakeholders in the GREEN-WIN project. Their typology based the concept of a value-consumption chain, which links production and consumption activities and identifies value-consumption chains with an overall ecological/climate benefit and individual economic benefits for countries, companies or households. For example, a company selling organic coffee roasted with biogas instead of fossil fuel energy includes at least four interconnected actors and activities that together realize a win-win solution. This includes farmers processing farm waste for use as biogas, coffee-roasters using biogas to roast coffee, coffee distributors purchasing and labelling such biogas roasted coffee and consumers purchasing the coffee.

3.2 Win-win strategies in climate finance

A second set of papers address the cross-cutting issue of financing WWS, exploring questions regarding the role of international and sectoral policies for increasing the flow of finance for the sustainability transition. Ameli et al. ( 2019 ) question whether the current regulatory emphasis on disclosure of climate risks for financial actors is sufficient for shifting institutional investors (i.e. insurers and pension funds) towards the green investments needed for a sustainability transition to meet the Paris Agreement targets. Interviewing institutional investors, they find that barriers to redirecting financial flows towards sustainability will not be overcome by regulating disclosure alone, but that incentives for long-term investment, e.g. through public investments aimed at de-risking and stable policy targets are also needed.

Paroussos et al. ( 2019 ) apply a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to assess the macro-economic impacts of low-cost finance for climate mitigation measures, as a complement to stringent mitigation policies. The results show that increased growth along with emission reductions can result from such financing instruments and policies aimed at meeting greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.

Mandel et al. ( 2019 ) assess the role of networks on technological diffusion, and the potential for international policy levers such as climate clubs (Stewart et al. 2017 ), to realise GHG emission reductions through making use of such diffusion networks. The authors develop a model of technological diffusion using micro-data for three key mitigation technologies as follows: e-mobility, renewable energy and agriculture. They then apply the model to test the effect of climate clubs on the speed of mitigation technology adoption. They find that large emerging countries like China and India can play a fundamental role in climate mitigation globally through such climate clubs if levels of emission and potential role in technological diffusion are taken into account.

3.3 Win-win strategies at the local level

A third set of papers brings the analytical focus down to the local or municipal level, analysing the WWS in urban and rural settings. Ma et al. ( 2019 ) analyse governance and business development processes for WWS in urban sustainability. They analyse four distinctive urban green business cases: free-floating bike sharing in Shanghai (Mobike), a renewable energy cooperative in Girona (Som Energia), urban agriculture in Venice and green building start-ups in Istanbul. They find that the following three enabling processes are needed for urban WWS to emerge: (i) co-creation of sustainable values between business and society; (ii) co-evolution between the business and the city’s visions and policies; and (iii) co-governance between society, business and government at multiple levels.

Yazar et al. ( 2019 ) explore the sustainable urban renewal strategy in Istanbul as a WWS, promoting urban economic growth and improving environmental quality, as well as its distributional implications in the context of the current “green gentrification” debate. They find that sustainable urban renewal has been steered by a powerful construction lobby, which has resulted in parcelled ‘redeveloped neighbourhoods’ that realise only marginal environmental benefits, while substantially increasing real estate prices in the redeveloped areas and displacing existing populations.

Lan et al. ( 2019 ) analyse consumption patterns and behaviour changes related to risk perception in sharing economy business models, focusing on EVCARD, an electric vehicle (EV) sharing scheme in Shanghai. They show that the perceived scarcity risk of the EV-sharing scheme significantly affects access-based consumption behaviour and collaborative consumption behaviour. They also find that while using an EV-sharing system is vital for substituting ownership-based consumption, users’ access-based consumption behaviour does not necessarily induce collaborative consumption behaviours effectively. Therefore, if the sharing businesses need their users for maintaining the sharing system, users need to be guided towards this end from the outset through values orientation and incentives.

Bisaro et al. ( 2019 ) examine coastal urban land reclamation as a potential win-win strategy by which governments responsible for adaptation can recoup their investments in coastal protection infrastructure through capturing value from newly created land. Examining cases in Germany, the Netherlands and the Maldives, they find that urban land reclamation is a highly attractive strategy for public finance and can provide adaptation benefits in settings where alternative coastal development pathways are not feasible. Furthermore, they show that land reclamation gives rise to a distributional issue regarding the share of social housing included in the planning of projects and how access to social housing leases is distributed after implementation.

Chaar et al. ( 2019 ) analyse how the transition towards sustainability might develop in the post-conflict country of Lebanon. Applying a neo-institutional approach, focused on key actors and institutions, they analyse the case of the development of renewable energy in Lebanon to understand how green initiatives might emerge without a prior master plan. They find that the renewables target of 12% in the energy mix by 2020 pledged at the COP15, along with financial and technical support from UNDP, has led to the development of a viable green business ecosystem for realising the sustainability transition.

3.4 Comparing win-win strategies across cases at the local level

Finally, three papers address the questions of which kind of enabling environment is needed for WWS to emerge, and what is the potential for scaling WWS. Tàbara et al. ( 2019 ) examine a number of “micro” WWS in South Africa, Indonesia and India, addressing the question of what aspects of the social and cultural context have allowed these solutions to emerge. The authors find that the global Sustainable Development Goals may mean very little at the local level, especially when very pressing and basic needs need to be fulfilled. In general, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The ability of communities, social business or entrepreneurs to generate innovative albeit ‘imperfect’ solutions fitting to their specific contexts is key to the emergence of WWS. For example, in Indonesia, social entrepreneurs developed a coffee and biogas production solution that reduced farmers’ vulnerability to climate change by diversifying products (moving beyond rice) and switching to sustainable energy sources.

Yazar et al. ( 2020 ) assess the challenges of realizing regime destabilization opportunities and a transition to sustainability through WWS in the transport and building sectors in Shanghai and Istanbul, respectively. They find that without adequate enabling environments for regime destabilisation, urban transitions to sustainability may fail to achieve effective low-carbon action and progress towards meeting the sustainable development goals. They also show that while deliberate and collective efforts are underway from multiple agents within and beyond the two megacities, the environments for regime destabilisation in the sectors considered remain insufficient primarily due to conflicting priorities among key agents in the underlying urban systems.

Finally, Omann et al. ( 2019 ) explore the question of whether WWS can be implemented in other socio-economic settings, can engender enabling changes in political and legal contexts and can initiate deeper social and cultural change needed for the sustainability transition. They identify several WWS that can be implemented in other contexts and that have the potential to change political, legal, social and cultural contexts. For example, Ilova Sugar in Africa successfully implemented a WWS for sharing the cost of flood risk reduction investments with private farmers in its supply chain, which led the company and other actors in the business ecosystem to consider its applicability in other settings.

4 Conclusions

Arguably, the most dominant narrative about climate change is the “doom and gloom” narrative, which emphasises problems, costs and adverse impacts of climate change, as well as global top-down solutions. While this narrative has been successful in bringing climate change onto the political agendas, and a substantial amount of climate research is underpinning this narrative, it is less clear to what extent this narrative can today mobilise effective and sustainable climate responses at multiple scales of action.

Hence, this special issue explores complementary, transformative narratives for climate action that highlight economic and social development opportunities. These narratives are built around win-win strategies, which provide practicable solutions that provide near-term economic benefit to individual businesses, municipalities or countries, and at the same time contribute to meeting climate mitigation, adaptation and other sustainability goals. So far, little empirical research has been conducted on such win-win strategies. The GREEN-WIN project addressed this gap and co-developed and empirically validated a set of transformative win-win narratives for diverse domains of climate adaptation and mitigation action at multiple societal scales and using mixed methods.

In all the domains of climate action investigated, we find that win-win strategies exist and that they indeed seem to be a necessary piece for advancing climate action today, because, in all the domains we investigated, climate action is predominately driven by economic and social opportunities. Hence, significant additional potential for climate action can be unleashed through bottom-up work searching for green business and development opportunities and inquiring how to overcome barriers to their realisation.

Another important finding from this work is that win-win strategies are diverse, cut across different groups of society, emerge under specific learning processes and are usually not self-evident. Most win-win strategies found are not the product of a particular sector working on its own, e.g. government, business or citizens, but rather of a configuration of actors from each of these sectors working together. The complexity of both the climate/sustainability challenge and the networks of social and economic relations in which this challenge is embedded, means that there is no single optimal solution. Rather, we need clusters of solutions adapted to many contexts and engaging multiple constituencies of action.

The results across cases also highlight the important role of a social environment that enables and supports the collaborative development and implementation of win-win strategies. Often we do not know beforehand what win-win strategies emerge within a system or whether a strategy working in one place will work or be applicable in another. Rigid and predesigned solutions may thus not work. Place, space and context matters.

However, the emergence of win-win solutions can be supported by providing the right environment. This includes proving incentives for learning and opportunity spaces that foster new forms of value co-creation among ‘climate policy entrepreneurs’, ‘green business entrepreneurs’ and ‘green prosumers’. This also includes raising awareness of multiple co-benefits that climate action could provide and developing a collective and effective vision of a sustainable future.

Last but not the least, we must carefully consider the distributional implications of win-win strategies, because these are driven by revenue generation, which creates the risk that revenues are captured by powerful interest groups. For example, the coastal adaptation win-win identified in GREEN-WIN depends on privatizing some part of the value created by public investment in land reclamation. Whether and how this value is redistributed across society is a key social justice issue to consider for win-win strategies.

Change history

07 july 2020.

The original version of this article was revised. The order of the author group was changed and a typo in the last name of J. David Tàbara was corrected.

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This article is part of a Special Issue on Win-Win Solutions to Climatic Change edited by Diana Mangalagiu, Alexander Bisaro, Jochen Hinkel and Joan David Tàbara

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Hinkel, J., Mangalagiu, D., Bisaro, A. et al. Transformative narratives for climate action. Climatic Change 160 , 495–506 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02761-y

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Essay on Global Warming

Essay On Global Warming

Essay on global warming is an important topic for students to understand. The essay brings to light the plight of the environment and the repercussion of anthropogenic activities. Continue reading to discover tips and tricks for writing an engaging and interesting essay on global warming.

Essay On Global Warming in 300 Words

Global warming is a phenomenon where the earth’s average temperature rises due to increased amounts of greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and ozone trap the incoming radiation from the sun. This effect creates a natural “blanket”, which prevents the heat from escaping back into the atmosphere. This effect is called the greenhouse effect.

Contrary to popular belief, greenhouse gases are not inherently bad. In fact, the greenhouse effect is quite important for life on earth. Without this effect, the sun’s radiation would be reflected back into the atmosphere, freezing the surface and making life impossible. However, when greenhouse gases in excess amounts get trapped, serious repercussions begin to appear. The polar ice caps begin to melt, leading to a rise in sea levels. Furthermore, the greenhouse effect is accelerated when polar ice caps and sea ice melts. This is due to the fact the ice reflects 50% to 70% of the sun’s rays back into space, but without ice, the solar radiation gets absorbed. Seawater reflects only 6% of the sun’s radiation back into space. What’s more frightening is the fact that the poles contain large amounts of carbon dioxide trapped within the ice. If this ice melts, it will significantly contribute to global warming.

A related scenario when this phenomenon goes out of control is the runaway-greenhouse effect. This scenario is essentially similar to an apocalypse, but it is all too real. Though this has never happened in the earth’s entire history, it is speculated to have occurred on Venus. Millions of years ago, Venus was thought to have an atmosphere similar to that of the earth. But due to the runaway greenhouse effect, surface temperatures around the planet began rising.

If this occurs on the earth, the runaway greenhouse effect will lead to many unpleasant scenarios – temperatures will rise hot enough for oceans to evaporate. Once the oceans evaporate, the rocks will start to sublimate under heat. In order to prevent such a scenario, proper measures have to be taken to stop climate change.

More to Read: Learn How Greenhouse Effect works

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The Year You Finally Read a Book About Climate Change

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Selected by the editors of the Books and Climate Desks

April 19, 2020

P erhaps you prefer reading to escape reality, not confront it. But if the 50th anniversary of Earth Day has inspired you to decide that now’s the time to pick up a book about climate change, we’re here to help you find the right one for you.

I don’t even know where to start.

What We Know About Climate Change

by Kerry Emanuel

An M.I.T. climatologist and a conservative, Emanuel sounds the alarm in a measured and scientifically sound way, making clear what we know and what we don’t know. There is little panic in this slender book, but there is a lot of troubling information.

Emanuel specifically thought of his book as a way of offering ammunition to those trying to convince family members or friends who are skeptical or don’t understand the science.

“Young adults who are disputing this problem with their own parents or an uncle or something — they can hand the book to them and say, ‘Will you at least read this?’” Emanuel said in a 2013 interview with The Times. “One at a time, you might change minds.”

I just want to understand how we got here.

The End of Nature

by Bill McKibben

McKibben wrote this book in 1989 when global warming was still referred to with the more innocuous sounding phrase “the greenhouse effect.” It was an abstract worry in the future even for environmentalists, who were still reeling from the fight to save the ozone layer. For McKibben the crises were connected and spoke to a bigger problem: a disregard for nature and how humans were capable of harming it.

His book is a lament that nature has lost its independence. Even if everything could be done to stave off warming, McKibben writes, it would have to come from human ingenuity and depend on our intervention into natural processes. This is another sign that we have encroached too far — that nature itself is over, as McKibben puts it.

His only solution, one we certainly have not heeded in the decades since, is to take a step back, “to go no farther down the path we've been following.”

I’m ready for the hard truth. Don’t sugar-coat it.

The Sixth Extinction

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Reporting from the Andes, the Amazon rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef and her own backyard, Kolbert registers the impact of climate change on the life of our planet. What emerges is a picture of the sixth mass extinction, which threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all species on Earth within this century.

All the warnings are here, in Kolbert’s elegant, accessible prose: sea levels rising, deforestation, the dispersion of disease-carrying species. But she also digs deep, offering an intellectual history of “extinction” and placing in context the catastrophes ahead by grappling with how life on Earth ended and was regenerated in the distant past.

“By disrupting these systems,” Kolbert writes, “we’re putting our own survival in danger.”

You might also like: “ Field Notes From a Catastrophe ” by Elizabeth Kolbert

For the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, The New York Times is bringing you The Greenhouse, a five-part digital event series on climate change. Join us on our next live video call this Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, where the Times Book Review editor Gal Beckerman and climate journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis will discuss this recommended list. They will also be joined by Amitav Ghosh, the author of "The Great Derangement."

Who saw this coming?

The Drowned World

by J.G. Ballard

With its vision of a London swamped by the rising Thames River and a warming planet leading to an urban landscape of lush tropical foliage, Ballard’s dystopian fantasy — written in 1962 — laid the groundwork for generations of climate-change fiction to come. The book imagines the dawning of a new geologic age like the one environmentalists now call the Anthropocene, with resulting changes to a broad swath of plant and animal species, humans very much among them.

The plot involves a looter who refuses to leave London even as the water grows hotter, and an expedition of scientists trying to determine whether civilization might someday take root again. “But the main action is in the deeper reaches of the mind,” Kingsley Amis wrote in a 1963 review of the book for The Observer, “the main merit the extraordinary imaginative power with which whatever inhabits these reaches is externalized in concrete form. The book blazes with images, striking in themselves and yet continuously meaningful.”

You might also like: Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy

I’m fascinated by how people behave when things get bad.

by John Lanchester

Lanchester’s novel, published in 2019, elegantly and chillingly imagines how current political attitudes might play out as the repercussions of climate change grow more severe. With sea levels rising and extreme weather events increasingly common, an island nation that closely resembles Britain has built a concrete wall around its entire perimeter to hold back both the water and the desperate tide of refugees from harder-hit areas.

The narrator, Joseph Kavanagh, has embarked on his mandatory two-year service as a “Defender,” guarding a section of the wall against outsiders even as he falls in love and mulls in restrained language about what the future will bring. That includes the threat of invasion, as a government official tells the Defenders at a pivotal moment: “The shelter blew away, the waters rose to the higher ground, the ground baked, the crops died, the ledge crumbled, the well dried up. The safety was an illusion. … The Others are coming.”

Did we learn anything from Hurricane Katrina?

Salvage the Bones

by Jesmyn Ward

Set in the days leading up to and immediately after Hurricane Katrina, this National Book Award-winning novel follows a black family in Mississippi as it prepares for, and recovers from, disaster. Esch, a pregnant teenager, is at the center of the story. A fierce, mythology-loving young woman, she’s quick to connect the events of her own life with those of the Greeks.

For all the devastation at its core, this is an insistently hopeful book. As our reviewer put it: “Like every good myth, at its heart, the book is salvific; it wants to teach you how to wait out the storm and swim to safety.”

I live on the coast. How scared should I be?

The Water Will Come

by Jeff Goodell

“Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity,” Goodell writes at the start of his book, published in 2017. “It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.” This book takes us there, to a place where we can picture Miami completely underwater.

Goodell, who has written other books about climate change, here travels the world to cities like Lagos, Rotterdam and Venice that are at risk of vanishing if the rise in water levels follows current projections.

Maybe the most interesting element he explores is people’s inability to see the rising tide. Talking to an influential developer in Miami, Goodell asks if he’s worried about the future when the ocean takes over. He isn’t, he says. “Besides,” the developer adds, “by that time, I’ll be dead, so what does it matter?”

New York is the center of my universe.

New York 2140

by Kim Stanley Robinson

It can be easy to forget that the island of Manhattan is just that, an island — but as rising waters encroach on coastal lands everywhere, life in the city has the potential to change dramatically. Robinson’s novel, published in 2017, envisions a financial district with canals in place of streets and an uptown crowded with skyscrapers as the wealthy move to higher ground.

A thought experiment with an ensemble cast, the novel is less concerned with a conventional plot than with showing a slice of life across various classes, with particular attention to the workings of the economy and other social systems. Maybe the most remarkable feature of the story is how little it imagines life changing, despite the drastically revised landscape: The building super works on repairing submerged apartments, the police inspector looks for missing squatters and the hedge funder bets on mortgages that are (literally) under water.

What’s happening to the Great Lakes?

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

by Dan Egan

Egan tells the story of the Great Lakes as a series of radical ecological mutations. Ever since the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, and accelerating after the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, the lakes have experienced a parade of ever more villainous invaders, from the vampire-like lamprey to a small bug-eyed fish called the alewife. The attempts to defeat them only led to a series of unintended consequences that made matters worse.

This is a classic case of human meddling. Lake Erie in particular provides water to 11 million people and experiences more debilitating algal blooms than any of the other Great Lakes. It is suffering because of the presence of life-sucking mussels that have made their way around the lakes on the hulls of speedboats.

All this means, Egan writes, that we could soon experience “a natural and public health disaster unlike anything this country has experienced in modern times.”

You might also like: “ The Ice at the End of the World ” by Jon Gertner

I know it’s all politics. So who’s to blame?

Losing Earth

by Nathaniel Rich

How did we get here, and more importantly, how long have we known it was going to get this bad? Rich’s book comes to the shocking conclusion that, as he puts it, “nearly every conversation we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979.”

This is a history of what could have been. Rich frames his narrative through a central character, Rafe Pomerance, a Friends of the Earth lobbyist who first came across the issue of global warming in a 1979 E.P.A. report. The problem was met with immediate concern, even by conservatives. But then? The initial clarity and momentum was lost. Rich sees politicians and energy companies as bearing most of the blame.

The sad fact we’re left with is that even though the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988, a hopeful convergence, more carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere since then than in all the preceding years’ of history of civilization.

Someone must be profiting from climate change. Where’s the money?

by McKenzie Funk

In this deeply reported 2014 book, Funk covers the globe to find the stories of those companies and countries that are responding to global warming in the most craven way imaginable. Rather than search for solutions, they are imagining the best means for making money off the changing contours of the planet.

Shell and Chevron are investing billions in oil fields in the Arctic, where retreating ice has created more exploitable land. China and speculators from Wall Street are setting up huge farms in African countries to take advantage of coming food shortages. Then there is the private security industry, which is gearing up to help prevent the movement of climate refugees with improved walls and surveillance equipment.

It’s a sad tale, which Funk tries to mitigate by also profiling those companies pouring their energies into creative responses to these situations.

I’d like a novel that taps into my current, IRL dread.

by Jenny Offill

Lizzie, the narrator of Offill’s latest novel, is a mother who’s juggling fears on multiple levels: concern for her brother, a recovering addict; financial worries; and general apprehension about the direction of the world. This taxonomy might feel familiar to many readers: How can you reconcile your personal, daily inconveniences with the fear that the world as we know it is ending?

Our reviewer pointed out the book’s narrative dilemma, asking: “What happens when the horror of climate change gets lodged so deep under our skin we can’t escape it any longer? What happens when an author manages to translate this horror from an abstraction to a gripping tale of immediate particulars?”

Ultimately, this slim book is an “attempt to tell a story about climate change that carries the same visceral force as our private emotional dramas — that is, in fact, inseparable from them.”

What are some future scenarios?

The Madaddam Trilogy

by Margaret Atwood

Atwood’s terrifying, though often very funny, series imagines the societal, economic and biological fallout from an ecological disaster right down to glowing rabbits, labs with names like the RejoovenEsense Compound and pseudo-foods called ChickieNobs.

“Oryx and Crake,” the first book, focuses on a character named Snowman, who makes his way as one of the last remaining humans in a post-pandemic world. “The Year of the Flood,” the next novel, essentially retells that story from other perspectives, giving Snowman’s backstory, set against the backdrop of the arrival of a disaster long feared by a religious cult. And as our reviewer wrote of “MaddAddam,” the finale: It “lights a fire from the fears of our age, then douses it with hope for the planet’s survival. But that survival may not include us.”

I’m a dystopian. Prepare me for the worst.

The Fifth Season

by N.K. Jemisin

This fantasy novel, the first in Jemisin’s astonishing Broken Earth trilogy, imagines social collapse going hand-in-hand with geologic catastrophe on a planet as violent as the people who inhabit it. With the world’s single supercontinent in the process of dividing, and climate change wrought by vast clouds of volcanic ash, the ruling elites work to subjugate a minority population that has some ability to influence planetary events.

In The Times, the science writer Annalee Newitz praised the book for exploring a science that is “oddly neglected in science fiction: the geophysics of exoplanets. Though we have plenty of stories about the physics of space travel and the biology of alien life, very few authors tackle the actual rocky, gassy, molten stuff that planets are made of. Jemisin does it brilliantly, crafting a tale that is both intensely moving and scientifically complex.” The book was the first by an African-American writer to win the Hugo Award for best novel, but not the last: Each of its sequels also won, making Jemisin the first author ever to win the Hugo for every book in a trilogy.

I need help arguing with my denialist uncle.

Merchants of Doubt

by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway

Two historians of science, Oreskes and Conway, take a step back to understand the ways that science itself can be co-opted. They begin by looking at how the tobacco industry got scientists to refute studies that linked smoking and lung cancer, and move on to the pernicious role that right-wing think tanks have played in undermining the scientific data about acid rain and the ozone layer.

The latest and perhaps most dangerous of these campaigns has been waged against climate change. Oreskes and Conway detail how little known but well-funded groups like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have managed to sow doubt on behalf of industries that don’t have an interest in confronting global warming.

The authors also have another warning: In the interest of balance, journalists have sometimes propagated ideas that are false and harmful, inadvertently helping to spread confusion.

I’m just an old-fashioned tree-hugger.

The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Trees are the real heroes of this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a series of interconnected stories that follow characters from 1800s New York to the timber wars of the Pacific Northwest. Whether it’s an immigrant family staking its new life on the American chestnut or an 11-year-old coder who has an unfortunate encounter with a Spanish oak, humans’ connections to trees make up the emotional core of this book.

As our our reviewer, Barbara Kingsolver, wrote of Powers: “Using the tools of story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size.”

You might also like: “ Barkskins ” by Annie Proulx

What about the animals?

Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

The sudden, unusual appearance of monarch butterflies rattles a rural Tennessee farm town, and a rift soon opens up in the community: Religious residents see the insect swarms as a sign from God, while others are drawn toward scientific explanations. Dellarobia, a young mother in an unhappy marriage, is one of the latter. When an entomologist comes to town to study the butterflies, he hires Dellarobia to work alongside him, offering her a chance to expand and improve her life.

Kingsolver, who was a scientist before she began writing novels, seamlessly weaves together the story of a biological aberration and a woman’s coming of age.

I only have time for one canonical read.

Parable of the Sower

by Octavia Butler

It’s 2024 California and the situation is dire: Water is scarce, communities are walled off and a pill called “pyro” gives immense pleasure to people who start fires. As one character puts it: “People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.”

This 1993 classic is composed of diary entries by an African-American teenager, Lauren, who’s determined to make her way in this new world. The daughter of a Baptist minister, she develops her own belief system, Earthseed, and has “hyperempathy,” which causes her to experience other people’s pain and pleasure as if it were her own. Eventually, she’s forced to flee her home and head north, accompanied by a group of survivors who rally behind her vision for a better world.

What will inspire the climate activist of the future?

Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg's Call to Save the Planet

by Jeanette Winter

With charming artwork and straightforward language, this picture book, aimed at children aged 3 to 8, uses the inspiring life story of the young climate activist Greta Thunberg to help kids understand climate change — and to give them a sense of what they can do about it.

By following Thunberg’s story — of a girl who at 15 decided she wasn’t going to be complacent about the crises she kept hearing about — young people can see how powerful an individual can be when they decide to act.

Though it’s aimed at informing and motivating, the book, like Thunberg, is also about urgency. Her dramatic words guide the tone: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic … I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

You might also like: “Science Comics: Wild Weather: Storms, Meteorology, and Climate” by MK Reed and Jonathan Hill

What will our grandchildren think of us?

The Great Derangement

by Amitav Ghosh

Ghosh gets right to the heart of the matter, imagining how our great grandchildren will view us and offering a disturbing vision: We are deranged. Our inability to deal with a catastrophe we can’t see but know is coming indicates a failure of imagination.

The interesting contribution of this book, which comes out of a series of lectures Ghosh delivered at the University of Chicago in 2015, is his indictment of the culture-makers. It has become unfashionable to seem too concerned. To make climate change the theme or setting of a novel, Ghosh writes, is “to court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence.”

His bigger point is that we need a change of narrative. But to do this means that those who make our narratives need to lead the way, to bring their talents of storytelling to bear on what is, he writes, no less than an “existential danger.”

What I can do right now?

The Story of More

by Hope Jahren

Jahren, the author of the acclaimed memoir “Lab Girl,” turns her attention to climate change and specifically the responsibility we each bear for contributing to the problem. It’s not a scolding book — Jahren approaches the problem from the perspective of her own personal life, her youth in the Midwest and her decision to move to Oslo in 2016 because of the state of scientific research in America.

She looks at the way our decisions about what we eat affect the planet as a whole. What concerns her is the divide between those who consume and waste more and those who live on much less. By looking at the global disparities, she comes to stark conclusions about who is the cause of the problem and what could be a solution.

As she puts it, “What was only a faint drumbeat as I began to research this book now rings in my head like a mantra: Use Less and Share More.”

You might also like: “ Fashionopolis ” by Dana Thomas

ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Global warming.

The causes, effects, and complexities of global warming are important to understand so that we can fight for the health of our planet.

Earth Science, Climatology

Tennessee Power Plant

Ash spews from a coal-fueled power plant in New Johnsonville, Tennessee, United States.

Photograph by Emory Kristof/ National Geographic

Global warming is the long-term warming of the planet’s overall temperature. Though this warming trend has been going on for a long time, its pace has significantly increased in the last hundred years due to the burning of fossil fuels . As the human population has increased, so has the volume of fossil fuels burned. Fossil fuels include coal, oil, and natural gas, and burning them causes what is known as the “greenhouse effect” in Earth’s atmosphere.

The greenhouse effect is when the sun’s rays penetrate the atmosphere, but when that heat is reflected off the surface cannot escape back into space. Gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels prevent the heat from leaving the atmosphere. These greenhouse gasses are carbon dioxide , chlorofluorocarbons, water vapor , methane , and nitrous oxide . The excess heat in the atmosphere has caused the average global temperature to rise overtime, otherwise known as global warming.

Global warming has presented another issue called climate change. Sometimes these phrases are used interchangeably, however, they are different. Climate change refers to changes in weather patterns and growing seasons around the world. It also refers to sea level rise caused by the expansion of warmer seas and melting ice sheets and glaciers . Global warming causes climate change, which poses a serious threat to life on Earth in the forms of widespread flooding and extreme weather. Scientists continue to study global warming and its impact on Earth.

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The big lie we’re told about climate change is that it’s our own fault

How to deal with despair over climate change.

by Mary Annaise Heglar

Ice in West Antarctica meets the ocean. The continent’s ice is melting at an accelerating rate.

The National Climate Assessment released a report last week with a startling warning: climate change could cause more damage to the American economy by 2100 than the 2008 Great Recession. It’s the second report in the last few months with dire predictions for our planet’s future due to global warming: In early October, the revered Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued an equally damning report — more like a prognosis — on our impending climate crisis.

It’s bleak, y’all. The planet has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius. We’d actually passed that threshold right around the time of the Paris climate agreement in 2015. The Paris agreement was meant to keep us from surpassing 2 degrees, and to make best efforts to keep it below 1.5 degrees. Between every single fraction of a degree lies untold levels of death and disease and generalized destruction.

America is warming fast. See how your city’s weather will be different by 2050.

Things are already bad. They are already getting worse. This report reveals — and, for many of us, confirms — that we’re not doing nearly enough to stop things from getting damn apocalyptic.

Many people who don’t think about climate change on a daily basis, or who thought it lived on some distant horizon they would never have to face, are now coming to terms with its terrifying reality. I get it. I’ve worked in the environmental field as a policy editor for nearly five years now.

People like me, and others in “the climate-verse” — activists on the ground, experts in the field, professionals at big greens — have all had that moment when we had to face the reality of climate change. For most of us, that moment hurt. I know it did for me.

I started working in the climate change advocacy world somewhat by accident when I got a job editing policy for an environmental advocacy organization. I cared about the earth, of course, but I wasn’t a hardcore environmentalist.

I spent my first year deeply immersed in detailed reports on climate policy. No detail was spared. Day in and day out, I read about the reckless course we were on and all the foolish ways we were digging our hole even deeper. It was terrifying.

I had known climate change was real. I had an inkling that it was not far away. But I didn’t know just how bad it was. I didn’t know how many innocent people were already suffering hideously. Pick a natural disaster — wildfire, hurricane, mudslide, or heat wave, many of which research shows have already been exacerbated by climate change — it’s always the people with the least to lose who get hurt the most. I didn’t know how many people had been marked as allowable casualties because they were born in the wrong places under the wrong circumstances. Right at that very moment.

I knew I would see bad things accelerate in my lifetime, but I didn’t know it was going to happen before I turned 50. Nor did I realize how many of them I’d actually already seen. After all, I was with my mother in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina and here in New York during Sandy. And if you’re thinking that climate change and hurricanes aren’t related, they’re not exactly divorced either .

My stages of grief

I didn’t know it then, but that first year I spent reading policy papers, I went into mourning. I skipped denial and went right to shock. I floated around on a dark, dark cloud. I frequently and randomly burst into tears, and I’d refuse to admit to myself that I knew exactly why I was crying.

When I was around bustling crowds of people, I saw death and destruction. When I walked on dry land, I saw floods. I imagined wild animals, especially snakes, getting out of the zoos in the aftermath of natural disasters. I worried about how we would treat each other in the face of such calamity. I doubted it would be kind. (I still doubt that, actually.)

I kept editing, but I tried to dissociate, pretending that none of it was real, as ridiculous as it sounds. That didn’t work either. The craft of editing demands empathy. You have to be present.

Then I went into depression. My social life turned into fits and spurts of intense engagement followed by equally intense withdrawal. I was deeply afraid of telling even the people closest to me what I knew and why I was so scared. I couldn’t sleep. The crying fits continued. They didn’t become more predictable.

I’d silently been asking myself: What am I fighting for? What am I trying for? Why am I paying my student loans? Hell, why am I saving for retirement? I was heading into a desperate space.

What are we fighting for?

One day at work, I came across the book that saved me: What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other , a book by environmental journalist Wen Stephenson that chronicles his transformation from reporter to climate activist. The prose was beautiful, and each page oozed with compassion without layering the issue with coats of sugar. It looked climate change squarely in the face.

One of the many, many things that book taught me was that I was not crazy. That my broken heart was normal. I was not the only one feeling it, and the best thing I could do was get out and talk to people who had already stood in front of this same emotional abyss and found the nerve to carry forward.

Then I moved from depression to anger. And I’m still in anger because, in this context, acceptance is bullshit.

We’re all in mourning

Whether we admit it or not, we’re all in the middle of one big, giant mourning process. We’re mourning our futures. We’re mourning the children we’re afraid to have. Our bucket lists. Our travel plans. Some of us are mourning homes already lost to fires or flood, or savings accounts wiped out helping relatives recover from hurricanes. Some of us are mourning our todays, even our yesterdays.

Denial is part of the traditional mourning process, but we have collectively spent way too long there. It’s time to snap out of it.

Given the sheer enormity of climate change, it’s okay to be depressed, to grieve. But please, don’t stay there too long. Join me in pure, unadulterated, righteous anger.

The dominant narrative around climate change tells us that it’s our fault. We left the lights on too long, didn’t close the refrigerator door, and didn’t recycle our paper. I’m here to tell you that is bullshit. If the light switch was connected to clean energy, who the hell cares if you left it on? The problem is not so much the consumption — it’s the supply. And your scrap paper did not hasten the end of the world.

Don’t give in to that shame. It’s not yours. The oil and gas industry is gaslighting you.

That same IPCC report revealed that a mere 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of global climate emissions . These people are locking you and everything you love into a tomb. You have every right to be pissed all the way off. And we have to make them hear about it.

It’s time to grow up

I grew a lot during that first year. And that’s why I say this with no intention of condescension: In order to face climate change, to truly look it in the eye, we have to grow up.

We can’t pretend this isn’t happening anymore. Especially for us Americans, our general privilege and relative comfort compared to so many in the world can make it easy to turn a blind eye. But we can’t pretend that some unnamed cavalry is coming to save us. We are the adults in this room. We have to save ourselves .

It’s not our fault, but it is very much our problem. It’s dire, but we have to dig in our heels and fight — for each other.

This essay is adapted from a Medium post .

Mary Annaise Heglar is the senior policy publications editor at a prominent environmental advocacy organization. She is based in New York City. Find her on Twitter @MaryHeglar .

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines , and pitch us at [email protected] .

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