If people don’t trust climate science, how will we ever get them to change their ways?

British people estimate that 65% of climate scientists agree human-caused climate change is happening, according to research from King’s College London. In reality, the figure is 99.9%. Another survey found that 67% don’t trust politicians to tell the truth about climate change – 54% don’t even trust journalists!

If people don’t trust that there’s a crisis occurring, there’s little hope in tackling it.

But Dr Hannah Ritchie is a radical optimist. A senior data scientist at the University of Oxford, she knows exactly how much trouble our planet is in and also knows that we all have the power to make a tangible difference.

The past few years have seen a dramatic increase in distrust towards experts in all fields, though none more critical than science. Ritchie believes that this has grown from the overwhelming amount of information now permanently at our fingertips and a desire for simple solutions to the plethora of increasingly complex problems we face.

“Sometimes it’s actually hard quite hard to properly debunk myths in a simple way, because there’s often some grain of truth in them,” she says. “What people will pick up on about electric cars, for instance, is that manufacturing the battery takes a lot of energy and emits a lot of carbon, and that’s true, but often that’s extrapolated into this notion that that means the car as a whole is worse for the climate, which is not true.

“When you first manufacture an electric car, it does have a slightly higher carbon footprint because it does take quite a bit of energy to make the battery. But once you start driving it, that carbon debt very quickly pays off. For the average driver in the UK, you’ll have paid off that debt from manufacturing within about a year and a half.”

Read more:

• There’s no trust left in the world. How can we get it back?
• Could telling better stories about climate change save the planet?
• These scientists felt powerless over the climate crisis – so they decided to do something about it

Media outlets are often guilty of leaning into conspiracy theories to generate clicks and sales from people keen to dismiss crises and divest themselves of responsibility.

“The headlines I see around renewable energy, for example, often gives this kind of conspiratorial lens – ‘Clean energy’s dirty secret!’ Ritchie says. “People read it and they feel like they’ve been lied to about clean energy’s benefits, but if you speak to experts, they tell you, ‘Yes, we don’t know what to do with wind turbine blades at the moment.’ They’re not pretending that these are perfect solutions with no downside.”

Ritchie also emphasises the role of language in creating myths. She points to buzzwords like “ultra-processed”, used to dismiss significantly more environmentally friendly meat substitutes as unhealthy by people who “don’t understand that many meat products are also ultra processed! And to equivalise a can of cola with a doughnut, with a loaf of bread, with a meat substitute burger just makes no sense. From a health perspective, they just are not comparable.”

Such false equivalencies derive from all-or-nothing thinking. “There is an obsession with perfectionism in the sense that we should only go for a solution if it’s completely perfect, and by completely perfect, I mean it generates zero waste, uses no land, requires no mining, no impacts whatsoever. The reality is that these solutions don’t exist. So if that’s what we’re searching for, we’ll be waiting forever and we’ll just stick with the current system.”

Ritchie says there are two distinct camps when it comes to finding solutions to the climate crisis. One focuses on the impact of the individual, the other places the blame squarely at the feet of the biggest emitters, like Amazon, Google and artificial intelligence companies, suggesting that our individual actions simply do not matter in comparison. But that way danger lies, Ritchie warns – for the planet and our psychological wellbeing.

“Individuals on their own cannot solve this. But the other extreme of, ‘This is purely a systemic problem, and it’s on businesses or governments to solve this, and individuals, what you do doesn’t matter; it’s all on them to fix it,’ is very disempowering for people,” she says.

“It’s a false dichotomy. Often, governments and businesses respond to public demand. So, let’s say we’re thinking about transitioning from petrol cars to electric cars, or public transport or walking or cycling. You can say that it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure there’s charging points everywhere, and it’s on companies to make sure that the alternatives are affordable.

“But they’re only going to do that if, as individuals, we’re willing to make that switch. If we all say, ‘No, we really like our petrol cars and there’s no way we’re switching,’ there’s obviously no systemic incentive for governments or companies to make that choice.”

Clearing the Air: A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change – in 50 Questions and Answers by Hannah Ritchie is out now (Chatto & Windus, £20).

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