Josh Spector got the message about climate change early on. At age six, he was already passionate about the need to meet humanity's existential challenge. In college, he majored in geographic data analysis at the University of Oregon and interned at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Upon graduating in 2020, he joined Planet Labs, a maker of tiny Earth-imaging satellites.
But as the pandemic dragged on, and heatwaves and wildfires ravaged the western United States, Spector's life began to unravel. Disillusioned with the values of his company's corporate clients, he quit his job, moved back to his parent's home in Portland and volunteered for a non-profit.
"I was hyper-focused on the climate crises that were happening all around me," he says. "Many days I would wake up, go on Twitter and see the suffering from acute events around the world. Sometimes that would cripple me for hours with feelings of immense depression, anxiety, sadness and helplessness."
Similar feelings of despair are now afflicting many of us during this summer of climate hell. Apocalyptic forest fires in Canada have sent a pall of smokey haze over much of the Northeast and Midwest. Heatwaves have broken temperature records across California, Arizona and much of the south. Ocean waters around southern Florida have nearly reached hot-tub temperatures, exceeding 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Torrential rainstorms powered by heat have destroyed roads, flooded homes and left at least six dead in Philadelphia and New York state.
Europe and Asia are also reeling from record-breaking heat. In mid-July, Italy placed 23 of its cities on red alert as temperatures there reached 114 degrees Fahrenheit. In Greece, forest fires raged near Athens. Beijing had temperatures over 95 degrees Fahrenheit for 28 days in a row, setting a record. Most shocking of all: The 15 hottest days for the entire planet, on average, all occurred in the first 18 days of July.
It only makes sense, then, that millions of people are worried that humanity may be facing the end of civilization, if not our species. In a 2021 survey of 10,000 children and young adults from 10 countries (including the U.S.), 59 percent said they were very or extremely worried about climate change. More than half said they felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless or guilty. Three-quarters said they think the future is "frightening." Another survey, of people in 31 countries, found that 40 percent did not want to have children because of the effects of climate change.
Welcome to the age of eco-anxiety—what the American Psychological Association defines as "the chronic fear of environmental catastrophe that comes from the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change and the associated concern for one's future and that of next generations."
But what if we're not actually headed to climate Armageddon? What if the long-term outlook for the future has lately become far less dire?
That's the question posed by a new breed of climate activists—eco-realists, they call themselves—who point to the surprisingly positive steps that governments, industry and ordinary people have taken in just the past few years, far outstripping recent projections. More progress is needed, of course, but greater gains, they say, will depend on millions of us trading our despair for positive action.
"If there were nothing we could do about climate change, being depressed or giving up would be a logical response," says Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy and one of the most ardent new climate messagers. "But if we realize that the future is in our hands, that means we can make a difference. That is what our hope is based on."
The World May Not End
To be clear, Hayhoe and like-minded scientists and activists are not saying that climate change isn't real. They concede that it's hard to peddle hope when so much news is downright apocalyptic. In March, for instance, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that the planet's average temperature is likely to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels within the first half of the 2030s, crossing a threshold once considered disastrous. "There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all," the report stated.
But hold on, the eco-realists say: Amid the dire news, another trend has emerged in just the past five years. As recently as 2019, many climate scientists were predicting that by the end of this century, the planet's average temperature would rise by nearly 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels. That would have turned large swaths of the planet into uninhabitable hellscapes, too warm for humans to live. Now, however, thanks to a dramatic and previously unimaginable increase in the use of green energy, temperatures are expected to rise by more like 2.5 degrees Celsius to 3 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit)—still bad, but not nearly as catastrophic.
The case for improving climate forecasts is made most powerfully in a forthcoming book by Hannah Ritchie, lead researcher at Our World in Data and a researcher at the Oxford Martin Program on Global Development at the University of Oxford. The title of her book: Not the End of the World.
"In a season of record temperatures, fires and floods, there's a glimmer of hope that averting the worst of climate change might still be possible," Ritchie wrote in a recent editorial in the Washington Post. "China, the world's top carbon emitter and greatest user of coal, is rolling out renewables at breakneck speed."
China, she says, is likely to add more solar power this year alone than the United States has ever put in place. One of every three cars sold in China last year, she notes, was electric—compared to just one in 15 in 2020.
Climate models from just five years ago failed to account for the extraordinary speed by which green energy sources would be adopted—or their prices would plummet. According to the International Energy Agency, the average cost of industrial-scale solar energy plummeted by 88 percent between 2010 and 2021, while the cost of onshore wind projects fell by 68 percent and the cost of offshore projects fell by 60 percent.
The remarkable drop in prices for renewables goes a long way toward explaining why this March, the U.S. Energy Information Administration announced that, for the first time ever, renewable energy sources generated more electric power in the United States than did coal. As recently as 2014, coal generated 42 percent of the electricity from U.S. power plants. By 2021, that figure had fallen by more than half, to just 19 percent. Global coal use, meanwhile, is believed to have peaked in 2013. Previous projections had assumed ever-rising use of coal through the end of the century.
Another development virtually unimaginable five years ago: skyrocketing sales of electric vehicles around the globe. Just since 2020, the total number of EVs on the road has tripled, from 10 million to 30 million. Last year alone, sales of EVs jumped 60 percent. And that's just the beginning of the EV revolution: On April 12, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rules that would require two-thirds of all new passenger vehicles sold in the United States to be electric by 2032. Compare that to last year, when a mere 5.8 percent of new cars sold in the United States were electric.
By limiting the expected rise in global temperatures, the shift toward green energy is projected to have a profound real-world impact. For instance, sea levels would be expected to rise by nearly three feet at 9 degrees Fahrenheit warming over pre-industrial levels, but less than one foot at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warming. The probability that the Arctic ocean will be free of ice in any one year is 63 percent at 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit warming but only 16 percent at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warming. The average length of a drought anywhere on the planet would increase by two months if temperatures rise by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, climate scientists estimate, compared to ten months if temperatures rise by 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
The lower projected increases in global temperatures are also expected to be substantially friendlier to plants and animals. If warming is kept to just 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels, 8 percent of mammals are projected to lose more than half of the range they currently inhabit on Earth. If warming reaches 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit, however, 42 percent of mammals will lose more than half their range. Likewise, if warming is kept to just 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, plants would lose 16 percent of their range, compared to 68 percent at 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit. Birds would lose 6 percent at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit versus 40 percent at 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit. And butterflies and moths would lose 10 percent of their range at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit versus 58 percent at 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit.
"There's increasingly broad recognition that the worst-case scenarios are implausible," says Matthew G. Burgess, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "Yet people seem to have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that climate change can be real and serious, which it is, but that it might not be the greatest threat to humanity we've ever known."
The public, says Hayhoe, needs to hear about the improving outlook. "Ten years ago, we were heading toward a world that would be 4 to 5 degrees Celsius warmer than today," she says. "Now we're heading to a world that will be only 3 degrees warmer."
Appealing to Our Better Angels
Climate scientists, who for decades have tried to grab people's attention with worst-case scenarios of catastrophic global warming, are beginning to wonder if their approach to public messaging has been counterproductive. With so many young people now scared out of their wits, the worry is that they're paralyzed by anxiety, fear and despair—unable to act just when action is needed urgently.
Climate leaders from the early fire-and-brimstone days of the movement to forestall climate change are beginning to emphasize the need to instill hope in the next generation. For instance, back in 1988, James E. Hansen, then director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, made headlines when he testified before Congress that global warming was real and getting worse. Recognized as one of the world's foremost climate scientists, he went on to write a book in 2009 with an ominous title: Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.
Now consider his latest book, Sophie's Planet, scheduled for publication in 2024. According to his publisher, "Hansen remains an optimist. Sophie's Planet turns toward solutions, asking: How can we connect the dots from climate observations to necessary policies? What can be done to preserve our planet for the young people who will follow us?"
In an email to Newsweek, Hansen says: "Young people should not be discouraged. They have a challenge, but it's an exciting one and less dangerous than many earlier ones, like World War II and the Vietnam war."
Bill McKibben is another lion of the movement to forestall calamitous climate change. His 1989 book The End of Nature was one of the first to ring the alarms for a general audience. His latest book, however, mixes in a note of hope to his otherwise bleak views. "I think we're uniquely ill prepared to cope with the emerging challenges," he writes in Falter. "Still, there is one sense in which I am less grim than in my younger days. This book ends with the conviction that resistance to these dangers is at least possible."
On the phone, McKibben explains what gives him hope: "People always come up to me at my talks to say, 'How do I make things better?' That strikes me as a very psychologically healthy response to the situation we're in. It's in some respects like any other emergency. If your house is on fire, what do you do? You try to put it out.
"The best antidote for despair," he says, "is action."
Even climate activist Peter Kalmus, who famously chained himself to the front door of the JP Morgan Chase building in Los Angeles to protest the bank's investments in fossil fuels, says that despair is not the answer.
"Too many people are feeling anxiety and despair about climate change and don't know what to do," he says. "We have to start connecting and building communities. Join a group. Talk about it. And know that you're not alone. It's a lot easier to deal with this if you're with friends and working together on something that can make a difference."
Perhaps the most surprising entrant to the ecorealism movement is a group calling itself "Bros for Decarbonization"—so surprising that the very title of their Twitter page states in parentheses that it is "not parody."
Initially, the eco Bros struggled to be taken seriously. But their message went viral after an April article in The New York Times described them as thinking "the best way to combat climate change is to ditch the gloom of earlier environmentalism and focus on what new technology can do."
And then there are the two young women who, on May 23, decided to protest climate change in their own special way. Standing in front of the Italian Senate in Rome, they dumped buckets of mud over their bare-chested bodies.
Positive action, it seems, comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes.
Getting Better
To pull himself out of his climate despair, Josh Spector sought help from Thomas Doherty, a psychologist in Portland who specializes in what he calls "ecotherapy." Doherty began devoting his practice to climate anxiety over 10 years ago, but he now has company: the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America lists 14 therapists around the country who are "climate aware."
One of his jobs as a therapist, Doherty says, is to reassure his clients that their fears and worries are legitimate. "A lot of people just need reassurance that it's normal to have these feelings," he says. "And they often feel isolated, like they're the only ones who feel the way they do. I encourage them to reach out to others who share their concerns."
Spector, now 25, began seeing Doherty in the spring of 2022.
"He helped immensely," Spector says. "I was trapped in this urgent mindset. He helped me shift into realizing this is a decades-long process. He talked about thinking of the movement as a line. I felt I always needed to be at the front of the line. He was saying that to be sustainable, you need to recognize that where you are on the line can change over time. You can move forward, you can move back. I had been guilting myself."
Doherty also encouraged Spector to pull away from spending hours on Twitter reading about climate catastrophes. Instead, he encouraged Spector to get out from behind a screen and see friends—including even old friends who have jobs with corporations that might not be eco-friendly.
"I'm definitely feeling better," he says. "I guess I realized I couldn't just live my life being this depressed, sad activist."
Climate change is bad enough, it would seem, without being devastated by grief and despair over it.
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