Written by João Talocchi

When the IPCC’s special report on 1.5ºC was released in 2018, it presented a concept called carbon budget — a set amount of additional greenhouse gas emissions that could be added to the atmosphere while still limiting the Earth’s warming to the recommended 1.5ºC increase.¹ The idea of a carbon budget is key — for ​​the atmosphere, the annual rate of emissions doesn't matter. What matters is the amount of carbon accumulated over time, which is what drives warming. If the planet was a bathtub — with our 1.5ºC target constituting the edges and carbon making up the water flowing out of a tap — we'd be very close to flooding the entire bathroom. Slowing the flow of water after the tub is full won't stop it from overflowing. What this means is that gradual emission reductions won't stop us from breaching what scientists say is the limit to avoid catastrophic impacts.

At the time of the IPCC special report, this message was translated to “we have 12 years to stop climate change”. Since then, this carbon budget has been reduced by half, as global emissions continue to grow. This should be read as “we don’t have another minute to lose”. It is important to note that these are not new projections. The temperature rise of recent decades is not a surprise to climate scientists, or the fossil fuel industry: it is exactly what they projected would happen if fossil fuels continued to be burnt at an increasing rate. For example, a 1981 study introduced a climate model that accurately predicted how temperatures would rise over the following 40 years, if there was a fast growth in fossil fuel use — and those projections became reality.²

Climate models have accurately predicted how temperatures would rise if fossil fuels continued to be burned.³ But beyond intangible scientific models, climate change is experienced by many people first-hand —in most places across the world, all that one needs to do is step outside. July 2023 will go down in the record books as the hottest month in 120,000 years.⁴ Temperature records were shattered in the US, Africa, China and Europe. Oceans in Florida and the Gulf of Mexico got hot-tub hot. Record rain and fatal flooding spread across South Korea, Japan, China, India, Pakistan and the US. Antarctic ice continued to be at a record low for the Southern winter — a one in thirteen million chance event. 

These events are driven by human activity since the 1850s,⁵ and mostly since the 1990s⁴ — when emissions rose by 60%. And with the current El Niño event — a naturally occurring climate pattern causing warmer weather which exacerbates the effects of climate change — likely lasting into 2024, it’s likely the records won’t end there. Among almost daily news of extreme weather events, UN Secretary General António Guterres declared that “The era of global warming has ended, and the era of global boiling has arrived”.⁴

Imagine if a company developed a product that people couldn't imagine living without, that had to be burned in order to be used, and provided a level of enjoyment and comfort — making it easy to market and sell. Now imagine that this industry knew that over time, their product would deteriorate people’s health and cause irreversible damage to our planet. With this knowledge in hands, the company decided to increase its marketing efforts and actively invest massive amounts of money in lobbying and public relations to create an even greater dependency on their products and public and political conditions for them to be highly accepted and used by society. Would the deaths and sickness that result from this be considered unfortunate events? 

In almost all aspects, the stories of the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry go hand in hand, with one key difference: while tobacco's harms fall mostly on individual users  (see Climate Misinformation), climate change — fueled by the fossil fuel industry — impacts mostly the people that have benefited the least from the fuels. Ultimately, it threatens most forms of life across the entire planet. These impacts are not unfortunate — they are the result of recklessness and greed. 

It is imperative to communicate that the climate impacts we are living now — and the ones expected for the future — are not an accident. They are the result of deliberate acts by a small number of industries and governments, by establishing technological and political systems that support and depend on those industries. It is also not enough to only draw a connection between extreme weather events and climate change: It is imperative to directly place blame where it belongs — holding the companies, CEOs and politicians who are holding back progress accountable in all ways possible — including by paying for the damages they have caused, and for the investments that are needed to deliver a global just energy transition.⁶

According to the latest major assessment of climate science from the IPCC, about 77% of all emissions of warming greenhouse gasses come from industrial activities, with the remainder caused mainly from farming and deforestation. Nearly all of those industrial emissions are linked to the burning of conventional fossil fuels.  We also know that climate models have been right in pointing out where we are headed, and that this destination doesn't look pretty. 

But we also know the solutions to the problem. In scientific terms, it means halving global emissions by 2030 — using a 2010 baseline — and reaching net zero by 2050.¹ But putting the numbers this way doesn’t mean much to most people without a background in climate science. It’s also an opportunity for never ending debates about pathways — with room for the unproven, expensive and less impactful preferences of the fossil fuel industry. 

As climate communicators, we need to get better at translating what the necessary change in direction looks like in everyday terms. While there is no silver bullet and solutions need to be implemented across almost every industry, there are some core actions that must become priority — and thus most urgently communicated and repeated. Because we don't have another minute to lose. 

Those against these key measures will argue that they will hamper development, that they are too difficult to implement, or too costly. But those arguments are incorrect —communicators need to remind audiences that the energy transition is a shift⁷ from a concentrated, expensive, polluting commodity-based system with no learning curve, to an efficient, manufactured, technology-driven system that offers continuously falling costs and is available everywhere. It is moving from heavy, fiery molecules to light, obedient electrons — from hunting fossil fuels to farming the sun.⁷ This transition has many additional benefits — from mitigating climate change and its impacts to job creation, better social and environmental conditions, the creation of stronger economies and many more.⁸

Knowing its days are numbered, the fossil fuel industry is going to spend the last of the 2.8 billion dollars in daily profits it made over the last 50 years,⁹ making as much money from its assets as it possibly can. Old friends may start acting as enemies going forward,¹⁰ as just happened with Mobil's new ads, which are a not-so-subtle attack on EV. These are industries that have worked together for about a century to hook the planet on fossil fuels. But while the industry has the influence and money to buy almost everything they want, they also know that they have a weak hand, as they cannot pay to change the basic physics and chemistry that rule Earth's atmosphere, which establish that their products must be phased out. They cannot buy the truth. 

In his book, The Righteous Mind, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that "the fact that we’re social creatures is key to understanding why we make the moral decisions we do. We act ‘morally’ primarily because we fear the social ramifications of getting caught acting immorally — we behave in ways we know we could justify to others if we had to. In this sense, the purpose of moral reasoning is to help us advance socially, whether by maintaining our reputations as moral individuals or persuading others to take our side in conflicts".¹¹ This means that one of the most critical steps in communicating the urgency of stopping the exploration of new fossil fuels — or the imperative to phase them out — is to remove the social license of the industry — to make it immoral and socially unacceptable to support it.

This is where smart, creative, and inspiring communications have a big role to play. Poet and writer Maya Angelou once said  "I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”.  Climate communications should balance the use of scientific data, economic analysis and other facts as the main argument for climate action, and start to communicate in ways that compels people to invest their attention, emotion, and action into the cause. It is important to remember that people fail to act not because they do not have enough information — but because they don’t care enough, don’t know what to do, feel overwhelmed, confused or hopeless.

Climate advocates will never have the resources to compete on the scale of polluting industries’ outreach — placing ads across TV, radio, papers, airports and public transit on a daily basis for years in a row — or to sponsor major sports events or cultural institutions. Therefore, it's critical that climate communications are done in very smart ways.  Advertisers and entertainers know how to do this well, which is why many climate campaigns are starting to target these industries. It is also why philanthropy and other funders should massively expand the amount of resources available for strategic climate communications. 

It is impossible to deny that we'll live through a growing number of extreme climate events in the coming years. These events are hard to predict and can have many forms - from extreme weather events to health emergencies to wars to supply chain breakdowns to financial crises and so on. Climate communicators need to be ready to respond to these moments, which can both open windows of opportunity for the acceleration of critical demands, but also set back many of the advances secured in the past years. At the initial months of COVID-19 and the invasion of Ukraine, were moments when the climate community took a lot of time to respond, either missing opportunities (COVID-19) or losing ground to the fossil fuel industry (Ukraine invasion), which took no time to flood the media and halls of power with their influence and narratives. 

Communicators have a critical role to play in these moments. We have most of the arguments and data that would be needed to build a winning response — but there are a few missing elements:

1. How to decide the moment is appropriate
2. The processes through which the field can coordinate and align around key messages
3. How these messages get packaged and delivered to the most important audiences and decision makers in a short amount of time. 

In order to do this, the movement needs to have the capacity to do horizon scanning — monitoring and preparing different plans of action for possible scenarios, while also developing systems and protocols that enable a variety of stakeholders to collaborate and respond quickly without jeopardizing other work that needs to happen. To reach these conditions, it is important that additional funding is dedicated to this — but also that existing resources are allocated in ways that allow for flexibility, change and innovation.

Extreme climate events are mostly predictable moments, and also periods when audiences are more open to climate messages and related calls to action. It is important for climate communicators to understand how to better collaborate around these moments - which generate opportunities for the advancement of our goals, but also present unique and immediate challenges. Increasing local and regional collaboration around responding to these events should be made a priority to create cohesion and allow for roles and responsibilities to be understood and divided amongst different groups.¹²

While climate change predictions present an increasingly grim outlook, numerous leading scientists have emphasized that stopping climate change is far from hopeless. Experts are increasingly concerned about the spreading sentiment that nothing can be done, and thus action is futile. Although climate change effects are escalating, the situation is not beyond hope if prompt actions are taken. Recent reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also stress this — indicating that while climate impacts are worsening, the level of disruption is contingent on the quantity of fossil fuels burned.¹³

Despite the daunting challenge of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius, there's a general consensus that temporarily exceeding this limit doesn't mean we should give up hope. Even as the threat escalates, evidence-based optimism persists — rooted in the knowledge that human activities can both exacerbate and mitigate this crisis.