The planet is in crisis, so why aren’t we all listening?

In a series of new reports, climate scientists across the world have again raised the alarm about the critical need for real action — before the impacts of climate change become truly catastrophic.

In Australia, the state of the climate report released yesterday by CSIRO and The Bureau of Meteorology revealed that Australia’s average temperature has already increased by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius since national records began.

A new report from the World Meteorological Organization just announced that Greenhouse gas levels globally surged to a new record in 2023, while the United Nations Environment Programme’s latest Emissions Gap Report warned that governments would have to cut greenhouse gases drastically – by 57 per cent by 2035 – to slow the global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. And just weeks ago, a team of international scientists published a global state of the climate report which warned: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt.”

All these scientific

papers agree the world is on track to blow right past the Paris Agreement’s target of limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees.

So why does it feel like nobody is listening?

In this episode, we dig into climate apathy (and how household income stress might play into it); individuals’ behavioural and psychological responses to stark climate news; and how the changing media landscape shapes the way we receive climate news.

Plus, the experts weigh in on solutions to the climate crisis – for governments, big corporations, and individuals.

Experts joining us for this episode are:

Dr Jaclyn Brown, Research Director for the Climate Intelligence Program and the lead of CSIRO’s Climate Science Centre

Nerilie Abram, Professor of climate science at The Australian National University in Canberra and Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science and the Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century

Dr Ben Newell, Professor of Behavioural Science in the School of Psychology at UNSW Sydney and Director of the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk & Response (ICRR)

Dr Lucy Richardson, Deputy Director of the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University, Melbourne