I had the impression that Hannah Ritchie's "Not The End Of The World" basically does some of this. It's been a while since i read it, but I remember it points out popular misconceptions and put things into scale, and gives the reader a sense of how impactful certain interventions are. I remember thinking it was pretty boring, straightforward, and uncontroversial, and it felt as it she was unnecessary hedging her writing in some form of "just to be clear, this sensible thing is what I'm saying and that stupid thing is absolutely not what I'm saying" as if the reader would totally deliberately misrepresent every single thing she says. But then I looked at the reviews on Goodreads, and boy is she getting misrepresented and attacked. I was completely baffled. It almost feels like with regards to the climate/environment you're only allowed to virtue signal and there's absolutely no room for calculating impact and making informed decisions based on that. Perhaps climate science has been politicised so severely that there's little room for any nuanced conversations. In this sense I'm less optimistic than you are on embarking on such a project, but I really hope to be proven wrong.
Completely agree. Read the book some years ago and wrote notes for each chapter. I felt she was doing a great job, and was baffled by the hostility of the reviews until I got thinking on how much ideological Virtue Signaling and political alignment means it's almost impossible to get honest conversations on this topic, and makes any reasonable attempt - like Hannah's book - open to all sorts of hate. I think she published a new one (follow up?) last year?
With two plus decades of direct experience in this field, I’d humbly suggest the most important communication challenges relate to deploying utility-scale wind, solar, storage, and building high voltage transmission lines - not climate science. Can’t win on climate without as close to a net zero power grid as we can get. Few appreciate the scale of what is needed to get built, the short amount of time to do so, and the rural opposition to development.
Hey Andy, I've been following your posts for a while and especially liked your post on 'little things dont add up for the climate'. I totally agree with you in this post and infact this sentiment has driven my work for the last two years.
I've been meaning to reach out to you and this post inspired me to comment. I'm a mountain guide and co-founder of Mieux Donner (french effective giving organisation). I've long felt that the outdoor industry is ripe for ea focused climate comms as the community is surprisingly alligned and totally untapped so I spend a lot of time educating other guides about climate communication with their groups and advising outdoor companies on their climate policies.
Last year, I co-created a fold out visual map on effective climate action that is in circulation with 1000+ mountain guides and clients in the Alps. I imagine you're very busy but I'd love your feedback on it so we can improve in year two as we aim to circulate to internationally. The aim of the map is to provide a visual aid that guides can do to educate their very wealthy and influential clients about effective actions and donations.
I have also just co-founded The World Climate Relay in collaboration with Giving Green. It's a week long challenge from 5 to 12 June where people take on a physical challenge of any kind and raise money for effective climate charities.
A large part of our comms are about educating people in a very simple way about which lifestyles choices really matter and why donations can affect systems change
If any of this is interesting to you, I'd love to talk more about brining your message to the outdoors community.
Ps) I've found clearing the air and not the end of the world by hannah Ritchie to be the most inspiring and clear climate pieces of communication I've read. And your posts to be honest :)
I don't have any concrete things to note here, but just want to mark that I'm excited to see what you write next! More stuff about climate would be interesting.
I had not realized that about the flight being ~2 weeks of average consumption. That being said, if I trust Google's estimates of NYC-->SFO C02 and the EPA's number about a typical passenger vehicle emitting around 4.6 metric tons of C02 a year, one cross-country flight is around 1/10th of a car's annual emissions. Which is not nothing!
Clear thinking well stated. Appreciate your leadership in this, Andy.
I’ve been embedded in these conversations for a large portion of my (personal) life and it’s become so noise>signal that I’ve genuinely had to just step back and say “I really am not interested in discussing climate with anyone.” I hope your and some of the promising initiatives you point to’s clear-eyed view on this improves the larger conversation for all of our sakes (and especially my own).
This is awesome, and I see an unprecedented opportunity here because of AI. The cost of a "weekend project" have dropped dramatically, I can now easily pull and visualize a public dataset (temperature, rainfall, etc) and/or summarize some obscure bureaucratic pdf with details about some important topic that no one looks at (eg local renewable policies etc) using AI in 1/10 of the time it took before, which may easily cross the boundary from a non-starter to something doable. I have almost no free time on top of family and work but recently still completed a small side project, a feat I haven't managed in the last decade. And yes it totally makes sense to direct this to climate issues (in the absence of an actual proper "market" for climate communication) as now we have an unprecedented amount of data and compute at our disposal.
I think the reason people don't focus on this sort of thing more is because the big problem in climate is not that people who care about climate are ignorant or confused (even if they sometimes are), but that most people simply don't believe climate change exists/is a problem or don't care enough to support the tradeoffs of significant policy change. Now, it may be true that people also go about solving that problem in ineffective ways, but that's more about political strategy and messaging.
Hi Marcus, your claim that most people don't care is a common misconception that is not supported by survey data. Check out the Climate Change in the American Mind reports by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and search "pluralistic ignorance climate change" on Google Scholar for the evidence.
"You should strongly defer to actual expert consensus unless you have an extremely good reason not to, but you need to figure out what the actual expert consensus is and not trust that social passwords align with it. "
Hear hear! Pious doom warning about climate change just elicit knee-jerk contrarianism- let’s put out the numbers , without drama , which is more persuasive.
Yes please!!! More communication on specific climate areas of possible work/climate action.
Um... also I noticed there are cartoons, on the 2021 IPPC report. I want to add them to this via a Note, how do I do that? Should I do that, if I can figure out how?
The reason there is no popular book summary of the IPCC report is simple. It would contradict all the alarmist rhetoric the climate scammers have been pushing. No increasing extreme weather, the increasing rate of sea level rise is either minuscule or non-existent, and temperatures aren’t rising fast at all.
Are you sure that your recent work hasn't gotten attention by happening to coincide with the social password of pro-chatbot people? I suspect that there are many people interested in being able to defend their chatbot use, and fewer people who are activated by learning the indirect impact of specific government policies on CO2 emissions
Fair yeah. Based on interactions I’ve had with readers most people who seem interested did think their chatbot use was seriously harming the planet before reading my stuff, but it’s a small sample size
It's hard to do work like this unless you're independently wealthy or someone is willing to pay you for it, and there's no market for clear communications, unfortunately. Academics are rewarded for speaking to other academics. Journalists lack the time (and usually, the basic scientific knowledge and numeracy), and most of their readers don't really want clarity. Organizations who might hire you have their own agendas to promote and don't necessarily *want* clarity either... they see promoting the "passwords" as more effective for what they want to accomplish. It's an unfortunate void in the modern intellectual landscape.... some enlightened billionaire could start a think tank and do something about it.
You're talking about the supply side (the ability to produce such clarity-enhancing analysis). You're right that this may become easier (though the takeup might be slower since there might be some overlap in "concerned about climate" and "thinks AI queries are destroying the planet even faster").
I'm talking about the demand side. (people willing to pay for clarity-enhancing analysis).
You wonder why there is so much "low hanging fruit" out there. To me it's not a mystery at all. Maybe I'm cynical and have struggled with this very issue for far too long in my own career, but unless you're independently wealthy or retired, *you can't do the work if nobody will pay you to do it*. There are two factors on the demand side that push against clarity and nuance (and without demand, you don't get paid).
The first is that organizations have become message factories that are ruthlessly dedicated to cutting through the noise by hammering their simple message. In the words of Paul Wells, If you're not helping them to cut through the noise, you *are* the noise.
The second is that many in the audience don't *want* clarity. Many people (not all) approach climate issues from an almost (dare I say it), tribal if not quasi-religious perspective. What they *want* is "pious doom mongering", as somebody said below. They *want* there to be purifying rituals, and guilty devils, and sacred victims. For most people the social and psychological payoff from showing "you're on the right team" is far higher than the payoff from nuanced and accurate understanding (and of course that cuts both ways). Nobody wants to know "how blessed *are* the meek, exactly"?
“A clear customizable visualization of how any one activity compares to your total daily and annual emissions, to help you figure out what to cut.”
I’m concerned that this could convince a lot of people to switch from beef to chicken without meaningfully decreasing their meat consumption, which would be a moral tragedy.
Maybe only comparing standard diet vs vegetarian would resolve that concern.
I had the impression that Hannah Ritchie's "Not The End Of The World" basically does some of this. It's been a while since i read it, but I remember it points out popular misconceptions and put things into scale, and gives the reader a sense of how impactful certain interventions are. I remember thinking it was pretty boring, straightforward, and uncontroversial, and it felt as it she was unnecessary hedging her writing in some form of "just to be clear, this sensible thing is what I'm saying and that stupid thing is absolutely not what I'm saying" as if the reader would totally deliberately misrepresent every single thing she says. But then I looked at the reviews on Goodreads, and boy is she getting misrepresented and attacked. I was completely baffled. It almost feels like with regards to the climate/environment you're only allowed to virtue signal and there's absolutely no room for calculating impact and making informed decisions based on that. Perhaps climate science has been politicised so severely that there's little room for any nuanced conversations. In this sense I'm less optimistic than you are on embarking on such a project, but I really hope to be proven wrong.
Completely agree. Read the book some years ago and wrote notes for each chapter. I felt she was doing a great job, and was baffled by the hostility of the reviews until I got thinking on how much ideological Virtue Signaling and political alignment means it's almost impossible to get honest conversations on this topic, and makes any reasonable attempt - like Hannah's book - open to all sorts of hate. I think she published a new one (follow up?) last year?
Thanks for the reminder! I just bought Ritchie’s “Clearing the Air” that was just published last month.
Have you read “how bad are bananas” by Mike Berners-Lee?
With two plus decades of direct experience in this field, I’d humbly suggest the most important communication challenges relate to deploying utility-scale wind, solar, storage, and building high voltage transmission lines - not climate science. Can’t win on climate without as close to a net zero power grid as we can get. Few appreciate the scale of what is needed to get built, the short amount of time to do so, and the rural opposition to development.
Hey Andy, I've been following your posts for a while and especially liked your post on 'little things dont add up for the climate'. I totally agree with you in this post and infact this sentiment has driven my work for the last two years.
I've been meaning to reach out to you and this post inspired me to comment. I'm a mountain guide and co-founder of Mieux Donner (french effective giving organisation). I've long felt that the outdoor industry is ripe for ea focused climate comms as the community is surprisingly alligned and totally untapped so I spend a lot of time educating other guides about climate communication with their groups and advising outdoor companies on their climate policies.
Last year, I co-created a fold out visual map on effective climate action that is in circulation with 1000+ mountain guides and clients in the Alps. I imagine you're very busy but I'd love your feedback on it so we can improve in year two as we aim to circulate to internationally. The aim of the map is to provide a visual aid that guides can do to educate their very wealthy and influential clients about effective actions and donations.
Map -> https://mieuxdonner.org/climate-map-bmg/
Pdf guide -> https://mieuxdonner.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/PDF-Climate-Map-Guide-July-2025.pdf
I have also just co-founded The World Climate Relay in collaboration with Giving Green. It's a week long challenge from 5 to 12 June where people take on a physical challenge of any kind and raise money for effective climate charities.
A large part of our comms are about educating people in a very simple way about which lifestyles choices really matter and why donations can affect systems change
https://www.worldclimaterelay.org/
If any of this is interesting to you, I'd love to talk more about brining your message to the outdoors community.
Ps) I've found clearing the air and not the end of the world by hannah Ritchie to be the most inspiring and clear climate pieces of communication I've read. And your posts to be honest :)
Yeah happy to chat more! Want to email me at andymasley@gmail.com?
I don't have any concrete things to note here, but just want to mark that I'm excited to see what you write next! More stuff about climate would be interesting.
I had not realized that about the flight being ~2 weeks of average consumption. That being said, if I trust Google's estimates of NYC-->SFO C02 and the EPA's number about a typical passenger vehicle emitting around 4.6 metric tons of C02 a year, one cross-country flight is around 1/10th of a car's annual emissions. Which is not nothing!
Thanks, Andy. Our World In Date (and Hannah Ritchie) are truly the best.
IMO, this was the most insightful piece on climate communication in the past week:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-scientists-who-declared-war-on
Clear thinking well stated. Appreciate your leadership in this, Andy.
I’ve been embedded in these conversations for a large portion of my (personal) life and it’s become so noise>signal that I’ve genuinely had to just step back and say “I really am not interested in discussing climate with anyone.” I hope your and some of the promising initiatives you point to’s clear-eyed view on this improves the larger conversation for all of our sakes (and especially my own).
This is awesome, and I see an unprecedented opportunity here because of AI. The cost of a "weekend project" have dropped dramatically, I can now easily pull and visualize a public dataset (temperature, rainfall, etc) and/or summarize some obscure bureaucratic pdf with details about some important topic that no one looks at (eg local renewable policies etc) using AI in 1/10 of the time it took before, which may easily cross the boundary from a non-starter to something doable. I have almost no free time on top of family and work but recently still completed a small side project, a feat I haven't managed in the last decade. And yes it totally makes sense to direct this to climate issues (in the absence of an actual proper "market" for climate communication) as now we have an unprecedented amount of data and compute at our disposal.
I think the reason people don't focus on this sort of thing more is because the big problem in climate is not that people who care about climate are ignorant or confused (even if they sometimes are), but that most people simply don't believe climate change exists/is a problem or don't care enough to support the tradeoffs of significant policy change. Now, it may be true that people also go about solving that problem in ineffective ways, but that's more about political strategy and messaging.
Hi Marcus, your claim that most people don't care is a common misconception that is not supported by survey data. Check out the Climate Change in the American Mind reports by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and search "pluralistic ignorance climate change" on Google Scholar for the evidence.
"You should strongly defer to actual expert consensus unless you have an extremely good reason not to, but you need to figure out what the actual expert consensus is and not trust that social passwords align with it. "
Very in line with my own experiences!
Hear hear! Pious doom warning about climate change just elicit knee-jerk contrarianism- let’s put out the numbers , without drama , which is more persuasive.
Yes please!!! More communication on specific climate areas of possible work/climate action.
Um... also I noticed there are cartoons, on the 2021 IPPC report. I want to add them to this via a Note, how do I do that? Should I do that, if I can figure out how?
The reason there is no popular book summary of the IPCC report is simple. It would contradict all the alarmist rhetoric the climate scammers have been pushing. No increasing extreme weather, the increasing rate of sea level rise is either minuscule or non-existent, and temperatures aren’t rising fast at all.
Are you sure that your recent work hasn't gotten attention by happening to coincide with the social password of pro-chatbot people? I suspect that there are many people interested in being able to defend their chatbot use, and fewer people who are activated by learning the indirect impact of specific government policies on CO2 emissions
Fair yeah. Based on interactions I’ve had with readers most people who seem interested did think their chatbot use was seriously harming the planet before reading my stuff, but it’s a small sample size
It's hard to do work like this unless you're independently wealthy or someone is willing to pay you for it, and there's no market for clear communications, unfortunately. Academics are rewarded for speaking to other academics. Journalists lack the time (and usually, the basic scientific knowledge and numeracy), and most of their readers don't really want clarity. Organizations who might hire you have their own agendas to promote and don't necessarily *want* clarity either... they see promoting the "passwords" as more effective for what they want to accomplish. It's an unfortunate void in the modern intellectual landscape.... some enlightened billionaire could start a think tank and do something about it.
idk, I think coding agents have lowered the barrier for a lot of this stuff
You're talking about the supply side (the ability to produce such clarity-enhancing analysis). You're right that this may become easier (though the takeup might be slower since there might be some overlap in "concerned about climate" and "thinks AI queries are destroying the planet even faster").
I'm talking about the demand side. (people willing to pay for clarity-enhancing analysis).
You wonder why there is so much "low hanging fruit" out there. To me it's not a mystery at all. Maybe I'm cynical and have struggled with this very issue for far too long in my own career, but unless you're independently wealthy or retired, *you can't do the work if nobody will pay you to do it*. There are two factors on the demand side that push against clarity and nuance (and without demand, you don't get paid).
The first is that organizations have become message factories that are ruthlessly dedicated to cutting through the noise by hammering their simple message. In the words of Paul Wells, If you're not helping them to cut through the noise, you *are* the noise.
The second is that many in the audience don't *want* clarity. Many people (not all) approach climate issues from an almost (dare I say it), tribal if not quasi-religious perspective. What they *want* is "pious doom mongering", as somebody said below. They *want* there to be purifying rituals, and guilty devils, and sacred victims. For most people the social and psychological payoff from showing "you're on the right team" is far higher than the payoff from nuanced and accurate understanding (and of course that cuts both ways). Nobody wants to know "how blessed *are* the meek, exactly"?
What "Cubicle Farmer" said.
Think of it like financial Efficient Market theory, but for punditry.
You're like a trader who found a big mispricing by analyzing a financial report, AND managed to do a successful trade based on it. Great work!
But trading overall is quite difficult, because there's just not that much around which is BOTH a big mispricing AND can be successfully traded.
The error ("low hanging fruit") is basically like thinking that all mispricings can be successfully traded. That's enormously far from correct.
“A clear customizable visualization of how any one activity compares to your total daily and annual emissions, to help you figure out what to cut.”
I’m concerned that this could convince a lot of people to switch from beef to chicken without meaningfully decreasing their meat consumption, which would be a moral tragedy.
Maybe only comparing standard diet vs vegetarian would resolve that concern.