CLIMATE CHANGE OPTIMISM

There are many books and online sites concerning climate change. The following is a selection of books, a podcast and a video story maker, which provide useful and mostly optimistic information on the progress we are making in dealing with climate change.

Sam Bentley
If you are feeling glum follow Sam Bentley (sambentley.co.uk) to uplift your spirits about the world! Sam makes monthly Good News video stories about the planet. He is on all social media platforms and has written a book Good News, Planet Earth: What’s Being Done to Save our World (2023). Watch his “Good News in 2024” (YouTube), a breezy round up of positive climate stories. He mentions over 70 things – watch and try to keep up! He includes: From China a massive increase in electric vehicles, from India a school where students pay fees in plastic waste, from Pakistan planting of mango trees to absorb storm damage, from Switzerland older women take their government to task over climate change, from Australia breeding of new corals, from London beavers are back, from Cambridge new ways to make emission free concrete, from Singapore super worms digest plastic, from Ukraine war rubble turns into new bricks and there’s much, much more!

The Climate Optimist Handbook by Anne Therese Gennari
This book is quite inspirational as it discusses the human psychology both on a personal and societal level of a practical response to the issues of climate change and her story on how she became a climate optimist. Whilst much of the current climate reality can feel dispiriting and overwhelming you can understand why people disengage from it. However once you focus on what you can positively influence on climate change at a personal and community level it changes the psychology and the narrative and you feel more optimistic especially when you demonstrate progress by example. Anne stresses the need to keep an open mind on the technologies, science and economics as it evolves and ensure you own ideas are based on scientific truth. The book also contains a useful glossary and explanation of climate terminology and a guide to actions you can take to cut emissions.

The Climate Question – How does climate change affect me? On BBC Sounds and YouTube.
A podcast series on BBC World Service, covering climate change across the world in a straightforward non-technical way.
Much of the talk about climate change covers very significant and dramatic changes around the world. But have you wondered how it could affect us in Devon, our foreign holidays, energy prices, or our food prices. This podcast explains that a warmer world is a wetter world, with wetter seasons. Rainfall records are broken regularly. A 1 degree increase in temperature enables the atmosphere to hold 7% more water. This can lead to catastrophic rainfall, like the recent deluge in Spain where one year’s worth of rain fell in one day. But in some places heating is soaking up the moisture e.g. in east Africa, causing severe droughts. Drought can increase risk of wildfires.
But we’ve always had severe weather, storms, heatwaves etc, so what’s different now? They are much more serious now as a result of climate change acting as an amplifier. Severe weather events are now more extreme. We may not have extreme wildfires here, but climate change does affect us through amplified storms, flooding, and heatwaves. Further the prices of food, including tea, coffee and olive oil are all rising significantly. And global tourism is contributing to climate change and many areas are being hugely affected by global heating, through flooding, pollution, changes in wildlife behaviour, drought and wildfires.
So the message of this podcast is that climate change affects us all. Do listen to it and other podcasts in the series.

The Climate Book created by Greta Thunberg
A series of essays by contributors from a wide range of disciplines. This is the biggest story in the world, and it must be spoken as far and wide as our voices can carry. It must be told in books and articles, in movies and in songs, at breakfast tables, lunch meetings and family gatherings, in lifts, at bus stops and in shops. In schools, boardrooms and marketplaces. At airports, in gyms and in bars. In the fields, in the warehouses and on factory floors. At union meetings, political workshops and football games. In kindergartens and old people’s homes. In hospitals and car-repair shops. On Instagram, TikTok and the evening news. On dusty country roads and in the streets and alleys of our towns and cities. The time has come for us all to tell this story, and perhaps even change the ending.

Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie
The subtitle ‘Surprising facts, dangerous myths and hopeful solutions for our future’ is an excellent summary of its content. Hannah is the deputy editor of the online Our World in Data ‘which brings together the latest data and research on the world’s largest problems and makes it accessible for a general audience.’ Hannah was inspired by Hans Rosling, a Swedish epidemiologist, who through engaging videos (available on YouTube), demonstrated that our beliefs in the progress we have made in tackling major global social issues is often wrong. We are doing far better than we think. The book covers many issues, including climate change, and shows the progress we have made. She is a realistic optimist, recognising we still need to do more to tackle the many environmental issues we face, but through data she demonstrates reasons to be optimistic by showing how far we have come.