Sometimes I wish I didn't know as much about climate change as I do. For my entire professional life, I have been obliged to stay up-to-date with advances in climate science, as well as every intricacy of political manoeuvring in relation to climate policy. I would sleep much better if I had never paid any attention to it.
You see, I don't reckon we are winning. And if you pressed me into looking forward and objectively considering if we are likely to deal with climate change before it is too late I would say, 'Nup, we are stuffed.'
I could bore you with talk of how the world isn't cutting emissions fast enough and even if countries meet their pledges to the Paris Agreement we still won't keep well under the 2 degree target that separates global pain from global catastrophe.
I could also drone on about how the world's climate is being much more sensitive to carbon pollution than we thought it would be. For instance, how ten years ago we thought no matter how much crap was pumped into the atmosphere, the Antarctic ice cap would hold firm, but now we know it is melting from underneath and sliding into the ocean.
Sure there are battle-by-battle victories: we managed to get some sort of global agreement on climate change, the uptake in renewables is better than expected and countries like China have stepped up to play a leadership role. But when you look at the big picture, that is the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere and how the climate is responding to this pollution, it gets clear how screwed we really are.
This makes it hard for all us climate-aware folk on two levels. One is the obvious woe-is-me rumination that is personally gruelling. The other problem is that doomsday talk is really unhelpful in motivating the public into caring about an issue and getting people to change their actions or political outlook.
We've got two decades of social research that says people turn off when a problem is so dire that it seems unsolvable. This is why environmental groups are so keen to talk up the successes of renewables and to focus debate on local binary issues like whether the Adani coal mine should go ahead. So we are left with this dichotomy where on one hand the situation is so dire, but on the other hand if we want anything to