- Jo Lindsay Walton, Sussex Digital Humanities Lab, University of Sussex
- Polina Levontin, Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London
‘The world is ending’, ‘the Earth will be uninhabitable’, ‘humans are going extinct’, ‘we are f⸻’. These are not uncommon sentiments when climate change comes up in university seminar rooms, often accompanied by nervous laughter. Against a background of rising eco-anxiety, how do we talk with students about climate change?
As universities move to embed sustainability across curricula, climate change is coming up more frequently. Educators in fields far removed from Earth Sciences may find themselves grappling with the complexities of climate science. Should we take these despairing statements seriously … and when and how should we counter them?
First, let’s be clear. It is very unlikely that the whole planet will become uninhabitable for humans any time soon. While the risks associated with climate change remain extremely high, the IPCC (the global body responsible for climate science) has lowered its upper bound predictions from about 5℃ to about 3℃, largely due to progress on renewable energy. The current median estimate of IPCC Earth Systems models is 2.2℃.
In the historic Paris Agreement of 2015, the world committed to holding global warming ‘well below’ 2℃ and ideally to 1.5℃. The bad news is that net greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise since 2015, and some of the coming years probably will be higher than 1.5℃. The good news is that progress to net zero has been made, and stabilising warming at 1.5℃ by the end of the century is still within reach – if existing strategies and technologies get enough support. Another reason to be optimistic is that the headline IPCC predictions don’t really account for new technologies that will likely appear in the next 75 years, let alone big socioeconomic shifts which might appear. So a reasonable interpretation is: the world is on a temperature increase trajectory which, although still dangerously high, is nevertheless already much less catastrophic than previous ‘business as usual’ scenarios. Furthermore, there are still many possible futures, including those that are flourishing and just — or simply somewhat better than the present.
True, 3℃ is now recognised to be more dangerous than was previously thought. This is because we are better at accounting for interactions between different risks. The picture is also complicated by the possibility of crossing tipping points. Tipping points are thresholds in climate systems which, once crossed, produce relatively rapid and typically irreversible changes in those systems. Examples are dieback of the Amazon rainforest, and the shutdown of an important system of ocean currents called the AMOC. In climate contexts that are human-caused, ‘rapid’ usually means decades or centuries.
But a key point is that tipping point science is quite different from the science of Earth Systems models. It is perfectly solid on its own terms, but things are just intrinsically less certain here. Dismissing the Earth Systems models puts you in the realm of climate change denialism. Whereas tipping points? There’s much more room for different possibilities. For educators and students alike, misplaced confidence in extreme scenarios which are very unlikely, or whose likelihood is unknown, can be a source of unwarranted climate distress. We know relatively little about tipping points, so it is possible we have already passed some of them, but will not know for sure for many decades. Or we might get lucky: key tipping points may be further off than we think. We cannot quantify the risk of crossing a tipping point yet, although we do know that the risk gets higher with every year of delaying net zero.
IPCC findings in general don’t form the basis of most people’s beliefs – demonstrating a lack of efficacy in climate education thus far. While the IPCC considers it a near certainty that climate change is caused by human actions, a sizeable proportion of Americans (29%) either think the climate is not changing, that humans have no responsibility, or are just not sure. While IPCC considers it highly unlikely that climate change will make the world uninhabitable, nearly two in five Americans think this is very likely. When we focus on young people specifically, fewer disagree with IPCC on the causes of climate change, but a higher proportion of young people hold catastrophic beliefs (Vercammen, Oswald, and Lawrance 2023; Clayton 2020). When we ask students to imagine the future impacts of climate change, they sometimes picture endless seas, dotted with floating seasteading communities, and archipelagos of the tops of skyscrapers. This lines up with survey evidence showing that many people believe that sea levels will rise higher and faster than the science predicts. IPCC projects around 30 cm for 1.5℃, and around 100 cm for 3℃ scenario by 2100.
So when students talk about the impending eco-apocalypse, should educators simply counter that science is offering many open doors, not just the door to dystopia? And then move on? We think that ideally educators can do much more. Students are already getting mixed messages: being told that everything is fine, while at the same time being told that the world is going to end. Feelings of doom and anxiety can be a reaction to the deep uncertainty – the sheer lack of explainability – and the seemingly out-of-control pace with which the world is changing. Educators can try to create trusted spaces where a more balanced range of uncertain futures can be explored, and feelings of impending doom (or occasionally gleeful eschatalogical abandon) can be collectively processed, not simply dismissed. Educators can also draw attention to successful climate activism, including legal victories (and ongoing court battles) scored by young people in a string of high-impact cases forcing governments take stronger climate action. For students who want to go deeper, an initiative like Exeter’s Green Consultants programme explicitly links sustainability skills and employability, and is open to all students. Such approaches might not only help students cope better with climate distress, but also encourage climate action by counteracting the lack of agency that often accompanies feelings of doom.
In holding climate conversations, educators may also find that sentiments expressed by students can operate as metaphors, not just as beliefs to be countered. Climate conversations are never just climate conversations. ‘The world is ending’ can be a placeholder for a complexity that students are not yet able to express. They might also deliberately be using hyperbole and humour to deal with nerves, or to prepare for the worst-case scenario. Students may not have decided how metaphorically and/or literally they mean something like ‘we’re all going to die’ or ‘the apocalypse is coming’. Moreover, one student may be saying it in a very metaphorical way, whereas another might be nodding along to a literal interpretation.
So what else might be expressed in these sentiments, besides climate crisis? Economic precarity and inequality; lack of good quality jobs, and agency and dignity within those jobs; racism, sexism, queerphobia, ableism, classism, and other forms of identity-based persecution; inadequate healthcare; food insecurity; energy insecurity; military conflict; the lack of social connectedness or its fragility and volatility; poor political leadership and weak and inequitable political institutions, and many more factors.
These are connected with climate, but also partly distinct from it. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” as the famous maxim goes. In both the Global South and the Global North, sweeping statements about the end of the world may also imply rejection or skepticism of grand frameworks such as capitalism, modernity, liberalism, neoliberalism, social democracy, development, growth, progress, Human Rights, secularism, religion, scientific rationality, and so on. This may mean not trusting that these frameworks are really what they claim to be, and/or distrusting that they will achieve what they set out to achieve.
Then there is biodiversity. Some students find the disappearance of entire categories of living beings emotionally devastating and cosmically disruptive. It’s a feeling that won’t be soothed away by hearing that many more species are not threatened with extinction, or that many extinctions have occurred throughout the planet’s history, or that evolution will give rise to new species in the long term.
Furthermore, as a great many Indigenous scholars, storytellers, and activists have expressed in various ways, ‘the’ end of ‘the’ world can be a Western-centric perspective, and many postcolonial peoples are already survivors of an apocalyptic violence that can justly be described as the end of the world.
Some or all these things might be expressed simultaneously in a vague and tangled up way, and they might also be mixed up with more personal and/or transient circumstances. There is a song by Phoebe Bridgers called ‘I Know the End.’ As Bridgers explains in an interview, the song is about the end of the world. But it is also about a relationship break-up, about getting sick of being on tour, and other things. The final lyric, ‘The end is here,’ is about turning around and seeing that the world has vanished … but it’s also just about getting to the end of the album.
Finally, we should be cautious of rigid categorisations of “positive” and “negative” feelings. For instance, writers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Sara Ahmed explore the informative and transformative potential of anger. Lauren Berlant shows how optimism can be cruel. Paul Bloom makes a case against empathy, and Bo Ruberg argues on behalf of no fun.
Given all this, where is an educator to begin? Giving an accurate account of the science is a good starting point. Some students may experience relief and even an improvement in longer-term wellbeing to learn that the picture is not as gloomy as they had gathered. But knowledge of IPCC reports is unlikely to alleviate anxiety caused by ‘a deep and troubling sense that something has gone wrong with the natural world and our relationship to it’ (Lifton 1982). So at a minimum, educators also should acknowledge the realities of climate distress, and recognise that these emotions are widely felt.
Ideally educators can also make space to understand where these apocalyptic feelings are coming from, and what they might mean. Initiatives like Faculty 4 A Future have plenty of resources for educators, with a fantastic emphasis on action. At Sussex, within the School of Media, Arts and Humanities, we’ve made one small step by putting together a Media, Arts and Humanities Sustainability Educator Toolkit, and an associated publication, Creating With Uncertainty that explores how we might make uncertainty into a source of delight, hope and inspiration.
More broadly, to give shape and concreteness to feelings of doom, and make them tractable to analysis and debate, means getting some handle on climate science and climate justice issues. It also means looking within our many diverse fields of expertise for transformative and hopeful potential on a range of issues. The role of an educator is not to clamp down on all exaggeration and melodrama and forbid it, but to seek its deeper significance.
Sussex Digital Humanities Lab Blog 