YouSaid · the spoken record

Johan Rockström

lines on the record: 60
first: 2025-11-24
most recent: 2025-11-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Or if we're past two degrees, you know, we're done, we're doomed. That's not how it works, right? Even if we're past 1.5, pursuing 1.6 or 1.7, these all make a difference to the final climate outcomes that we will have to deal with. So it's always worth making the effort to reduce those potential dangers and hazards as much as we can. Another question I get a lot is, you know, as individuals do we have any agency in this, right? And here I often hear kind of polar opposite arguments where some people are all about individual behavior change, right? This notion that, you know, if we all just do a little, you know, we'll fix this, I think that's incorrect, you know. It's not the case that if we all as individuals do something, we'll fix the huge global problem. But you also get the other extreme that says, you know, individuals don't matter. This is purely about systemic change, right? So it's only on governments and businesses and”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can absolutely make a difference. So, if you look at any of the kind of future pathways, the range of possible climate futures, you know, the trajectory we take is very much determined by the decisions we make today and tomorrow and the next day. And we're very much the driving force of the trajectory that we take, the final temperature rise that we end up in. I think people have a sense that there is often some single threshold in the system that once we pass that is over, there's nothing we can do to stop this. This is generally not how climate impacts work. What's really clear is that the higher the warming, the higher the impacts, right? So going from one point five to 1.6 to 1.7 to 1. All of those incremental increases in global temperatures make a difference to the impact. So I think people have this sense of, you know, if we're past 1.5, you know, we're done, we're doomed.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The question you get the most from people is are we doomed? You know, I think what people are really asking When they ask that is whether anything we do, innovation, growth, building really makes a difference. How do you think about our agency at this stage of the crisis? How much of a difference can we still make?”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not the sexiest cell for sure, but that doesn't mean it's the wrong way to look at things. I don't know. Have you always been pretty level-headed when it comes to this stuff, even before you dove into the data? Are you just wired for reasonableness? I mean, definitely not. I've changed a lot on this in the last decade or 15 years where now I'm framed as the kind of optimistic person on climate. But, you know, 15 years ago, I was very pessimistic. I was very much in the, we're all doomed because of climate change and there's just no way we're going to solve this. And I won't really have, as a young person, I won't really have a kind of livable planet to grow up in. So no, it's definitely not been hardwired in me. I think this has been kind of taught. And a lot of it has come from stepping back to look at the data. And that has actually rapidly shifted my perspective on this.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we are drawing more to these kind of interesting extremes rather than the kind of nuanced middle. Yeah, I don't know how wild the... marketing people were here when we came up with the name the gray area we're going to lean into the nuance”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most people get their information from the news or from social media. And I think the reality is that often nuanced stories just don't do well in the media, right? Often it is one extreme or the other that gets the attention. And if you are, that's where you're getting your news on what's happening on climate or any other issue, then I think you are mostly seeing the extremes in one or the other direction, right? As you say, either, you know, this climate's not a problem, we're doing fine, or the opposite, you know, the world's going to collapse tomorrow and we're all doomed. And I've spoken to journalists in the past about this, right? And their response has often been, well, we kind of want to produce the more nuanced stories that don't have the really clickbaity extreme headline, but then no one reads them and no one clicks on them. So I think there is this kind of unfortunate dynamic between people producing content and also us as consumers of content.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do often feel like we are kind of toggling between dueling climate stories. There's either a story about denial or a story about despair. And not much in between present company excluded. Do you think we're just naturally attracted to extremes? maybe in some ways that's just a simpler, neater way to look at the world. I think so. I think we're often more fine tuned, I think, to be pessimistic about the world in general. And I think there's some ingrained psychology in that in the past it's definitely more advantageous to think about what's the next problem that's coming in rather than saying, you know, oh, like how good we're doing. So I think there's that kind of psychological part in us. And then I think...”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specifically on the environment and climate, we're still in a very bad position on that. Progress has been too slow, but we have made progress in many different ways. And I think some of the very clear data there is on stuff like the price of renewables or the price of batteries and how competitive they are, or actually now how quickly we are deploying this stuff, which again, you just can only see through the data. You know, you're just not going to get that in a daily news headline. You need to step back and look at the data to understand the scale of what's happening on these solutions.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thanks very much for having me. Well, you have spent a lot of your time looking at cold, hard data, and somehow miraculously you've come out of that experience more hopeful, not less. What changed your mind about the path we're on? The focus of my work is often on environmental problems and climate change in particular. And I think before we even zoom in on the climate problem, I think one thing you get from looking at data and specifically data over long timescales, right? You know, how have things changed over decades or centuries? What you tend to find when you zoom out is that humans have made amazing progress in many ways. Actually, if you look at almost any kind of human development indicator, whether it's poverty or hunger or child mortality or saving mothers or life expectancy, the list goes on, we've made huge improvements over the last few centuries, and in particular over the last fifty years. We are capable of solving problems and making progress.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different st One What we're already Based on a whole different set of numbers, the ones that show us how far we've already come. I'm Sean Allen, and this is the gray area. My guest today is Hannah Ritchie. She's a data scientist at Oxford and the author of Clearing the Air. She calls herself a data optimist, and her work shows that the world is decarbonizing much faster than we think, and that the real challenge now isn't necessarily the technology, it's belief. Belief that progress is still possible, the kind that isn't focused on shrinking our world, but expanding what's possible, the kind that makes you want to live in the future. Anna Ritchie, welcome to the show.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT