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“It seems like we’ve been battling climate change for decades and made no progress,” Dr. Hannah Ritchie says. “I want to push back on that.” Ritchie, a senior researcher in the Program on Global Development at the University of Oxford and deputy editor at the online publication Our World in Data, is the author of the upcoming book, “Not the End of the World.” In it, she argues that the flood of doom-laden stats and stories about climate change is obscuring our ability to imagine solutions to the crisis and envision a sustainable, livable future. That brighter story is one Ritchie, who is 30, builds by pointing to the progress being made in areas like deforestation, air cleanliness, and the falling cost and rising adoption of clean-energy technologies. “For a long time I felt helplessness, that these problems were massive and unsolvable,” Ritchie says. “It’s important to counter those feelings. We need to go much faster, but there is a lot of progress to acknowledge and lessons to learn.” The year 2023 was the hottest on record — horrible wildfires, catastrophic flooding, ongoing loss of biodiversity, carbon emissions continuing to rise. I look at that and think, Boy, this is bad. How do you interpret the year we just had? We probably see it in a similar way. It has been an incredibly bad year. To some extent, it’s been anomalous. We’ve gone from having three consecutive years of La Niña, which tends to have a cooling impact, then rapidly flipped into an El Niño, which has a warming effect.

Which doesn’t take us away from the fact that we have a warming planet, but I also see the flip side, which is lots of positive things happening.

What feels most productive to me is not to stare at the bad stuff and say, “This is bad,” but to look and say: “This is positive stuff. How can I try to contribute to accelerating the good outpacing the bad?” Something like a third of Americans say climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress.

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Photo Illustration by Bráulio Amado

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