To solve a problem we must first understand it, but we’ve long been ‘aware’ of our climate crisis and still, largely, choose inaction. So why are activists still focused on ‘raising awareness’?

This article challenges the idea that activists still need to make the public aware of our climate crisis, and suggests a shift to inducing practical action is long overdue.

The good old days of climate inaction

The first Conference Of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was held in Berlin in 1995. That year marked:

• 300,000-odd years since humans emerged as tiny dots on a vast plain
• 10,000-odd years since agriculture gave rise to civilization
• 250-odd years since the Age of Steam kick-started our fossil fuel addiction
• 171 years since Joseph Fourier suggested our atmosphere was a blanket insulating Earth
• 99 years since Svante Arrhenius and Thomas Chamberlin calculated human activities could warm the earth by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere
• 18 years since Exxon shut down and silenced its science division after its internal report confirmed their industry was responsible for rising temperatures.

Homo sapiens had been inadvertently marching towards a huge abyss of climate collapse since the Industrial Revolution. 1995 marked a potential turning point. 

The leaders of 200-odd countries into which we divide our species agreed on the need to change course. 

They declared themselves not only ‘aware’ of the problem, but determined to jolly well do something to lead us from the abyss, and change course towards a sustainable future.

• The march could continue, but a small adjustment could divert us away from the abyss.
• The longer we waited to act, the bigger the required adjustment.
• We couldn’t tell exactly how far we were from abyss, but why risk getting too close?

Jessica/Michael

The biggest CO₂ emitter at the 1995 COP table was the USA. The most popular baby names in America that year were Jessica and Michael. 

Every passing year a candle was added to Jessica/Michael’s birthday cake. Every year our leaders added another COP.

Jessica/Michael, and COP, have hit their 30s.

When Jessica/Michael and COPs were born, the concentration of CO₂ in the sky above their crib/negotiating table in Berlin, was 361 ppm (parts per million). The pre-industrial level was 280 ppm.

The lag between emissions and impact meant that, by 1995, estimates of global temperature rises due to human activity were low tenths of a degree Celsius.

Such tiny increments were barely detectable in any particular locale. But they were meaningful to climate scientists and government science advisors. Grave enough for their warnings to not just raise government ‘awareness’, but to prompt action in the form of the first COP.

In 1995, when Jessica/Michael was born, none of the global community of 5.75Bn they’d joined had experienced a flood, storm, wildfire or drought the climate scientists could confidently blame on our fossil fuel addiction.

But even in 1995, the scientists’ numbers, graphs, projections and warnings were urgent enough to convince our non-scientist leaders to take action. 

Climate Awareness in the ‘90s

By 1995, the risks of inaction were well understood.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its first report in 1990. 

In 1998, when Jessica/Michael turned three, Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes published their devastating ‘hockey stick graph’.

Assembling data from a variety of historical sources, the hockey stick showed the dramatic uptick in atmospheric carbon emissions in the 20th century. It was a shocking visualization of the disastrous course we were taking, if we did nothing.

Three-year-old Jessica/Michael wouldn’t have known about COP 3, but in Dec 1997 their exhausted toddler-chasing parents might have heard the Kyoto Protocol mentioned on the news. For the first time, rich countries agreed to legally binding emissions reduction targets. 

Back then, the global climate story they were more likely to have been ‘aware’ of was still the hole in Earth’s ozone layer. 

From the ‘70’s, scientists had warned man-made chemicals in everyday products like aerosols, foams, refrigerators and air-conditioners were harming the ozone layer that protected us from ultraviolet radiation.

By 1985, the feared Antarctic hole was detected. Scientists confirmed chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were the culprit.

Politicians and climate scientists, now well ‘aware’ and responding to public pressure to take action, took action, in what the UN now calls the ‘ultimate repair job’:  

• 1985: Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer
• 1987: Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer 

By the ‘90s, the positive impact (on the ozone layer at least – many of the HFCs that replaced the dreaded CFCs were also disastrous greenhouse gases) was already evident. 

So if Jessica/Michael’s exhausted first-time parents did catch the news about the inaugural COP in Berlin on the wireless, they needn’t have worried. The response to the ozone crisis gave them every reason to be reassured the grown-ups on the planet will take action on this new negative consequence of headlong industrialisation.

Our leaders, it seemed, were on the case. Ready to nudge the rudder a bit in order to steer us all to safety.

That, they might have explained their curious three-year-old, was how the world worked:

1. Climate scientists raised the alert.
2. The public and politicians became ‘aware’.
3. Leaders took decisive action to fix the problem.

Babies Olivia/Noah and Yìchén/Měilín

The average American woman gives birth at the age of 30. Jessica and Michael are probably admiring their own first-born baby now. 

Fashions change, so they’re likely to have just named their baby Olivia or Noah, America’s most popular names in 2026. 

Economies and manufacturing bases change too. 

In 2006, when Jessica/Michael was 11, China overtook the USA as the world’s top emitter.

On the other side of the Pacific, their Chinese contemporaries are watching baby Yìchén/Měilín gurgle in their crib.

What’s changed over the lives of the 30-year-old parents of babies born today?

Today you’d struggle to find a parent who’s ‘unaware’ of human-induced climate change. 

The climate crisis has moved from IPCC report graphs and tables to real-world extreme weather events. 

Amazingly, climate change is still not always mentioned in media coverage of floods, storms, wildfires and droughts, but few actively deny it any more. There’s nowhere in the world where their increased intensity has not been experienced over any adult lifetime. 

It would be hard to find any adult these days who’s not directly or indirectly experienced some level of climate-change-amplified drowning, burning or shrivelling.

What of the powerful, wealthy and articulate leaders we rely on to guide us from such danger?

How successful have the Three-Headed Beasts of Government, Business and Media been in steering us away from stormy waters and shepherding us away from the abyss?

Was the ozone crisis all a dream?

What goes up, keeps going up

When Jessica/Michael was born in 1995, the sky above the crib/COP negotiating table in Berlin contained 361 parts per million (ppm) of greenhouse gases.

Today, baby Olivia/Noah in the USA, baby Yìchén/Měilín in China and all the other babies born in 2026, gurgle beneath a sky containing 422 ppm. 

That’s a rise of 61ppm over the lives of their 30-year-old parents. 

Over the 30 years before 1995, atmospheric carbon rose by 41 ppm. So it’s getting much worse, much faster.

How much will it have risen by the time Olivia/Noah admire their own baby in their cribs?

No one knows.

What’s certain is that:

• ‘Climate awareness’ is now functionally 100%. Even the diminishing minority who choose to deny human-induced climate change have to be ‘aware’ of it in order to deny it.
• Unlike our leaders, who’ve spent COPs 1-30 largely occupied in finger-pointing blame games, atmospheric physics remains indifferent to political boundaries.
• Whatever action we’ve taken so far has had negligible impact on the worst outcomes modelled by climate scientists in 1995. Limiting a rise to only 1.5 degrees already seems fanciful.

How much worse things could get by the time Olivia/Noah and Yìchén/Měilín add another human to the 9.88 Bn world population predicted for 2056? Much less certain, as it depends entirely on future action, and whatever we’ve done so far hasn’t even bent the hockey stick.

Now we’re hitting the tipping points beyond which current models become less reliable, it could rise even more steeply. 

Our current inaction means that by the time Olivia/Noah and Yìchén/Měilín reach their parents age, we may have heated our planet by another 1.5 degrees.

Or more.

But how could we have been aware?

Before Jessica/Michael, it took generations for major scientific breakthroughs to percolate from ivory towers and laboratories down into our collective consciousness. 

Improved literacy and communications have accelerated the speed at which the unthinkable becomes common knowledge.

Technology means we absorb each major new discovery more rapidly than the last. Consider:

• Copernicus and Galileo’s heliocentric solar system in the 16th century
• Darwin and Wallace’s natural selection in the mid-19th century 
• Hahn, Strassmann, Meitner and Frisch’s discovery of nuclear fission in 1938
• Watson, Crick, Franklin and Wilkin’s discovery of DNA in 1953

It took:

• Centuries for the common person to be ‘aware’ that the Earth revolved around the Sun
• Decades for evolution to be taught in schools
• Seven years before the whole world was only too aware of nuclear fission
• Five years for DNA’s double-helix structure to be taught in high schools

Each major discovery compresses the time the rest of us – including politicians, laws, institutions and economies – have to catch on to, and catch up with, their impact. 

The first Large Language Model was created in 2018. In the time Copenicus took to suck on his quill, and Darwin took to dithering about publishing On The Origin of Species, AI has transformed modern society. Within a handful of years, the technology’s economic, financial, ecological and political impact have become world-changing. 

And we’ve all become ‘aware’ of it.

The World Wide Web, launched in 1989, means Jessica/Michael, and everyone born since, has grown up in the Internet Age. Knowledge – and ‘awareness’ – has never spread faster and wider in human history.

75% of the 8Bn people alive today can access the Internet. Three-quarters of us now have the means to know the science, reality and impact of human-induced climate change.

The remaining quarter are already drowning, burning and shrivelling because of it. This is part of the problem. Atmospheric physics may be indifferent to who emits which carbon molecule, but wealth delays the impact of its worst effects. 

This makes it a particularly bad time to be increasing wealth inequality.

Despite the best efforts of the Three-Headed Beasts, who control more and more of both old and new media, to maintain Business As Usual by spreading climate disinformation, we’re joining the dots. 80-89% of us want our governments to do more to address climate change

Yet emissions continue to rise.

‘Awareness’ has not been the problem since Jessica/Michael was a teenager. 

The problem is inaction

Misdiagnose the malady, and you’re unlikely to find a cure.

If the problem is not awareness, but lack of action, anyone still devoting their efforts towards ‘educating the public’ per se, without any clear call-to-action destination, is fighting the last war.

Arguably, such Ineffective Activists are compounding the problem.

Fostering complacency by dressing up performative ‘education’ as a meaningful end, rather than a necessary means, risks being pointless ‘busy work’.  

Activists focused solely on ‘raising awareness’ today are not only kidding themselves, but complicit in kidding others. 

Campaigns and petitions that seek only to raise awareness are a cop-out to both petitioner and petitionee. Beyond aggravating their Big Oil paymasters, it costs politicians and businesses nothing to declare themselves ‘aware’ of a human-induced climate change unless it comes with a measurable call to action.

We’ve been holding COPs for three decades, during which they’ve become increasingly corrupted by fossil-fuel producing nations and Big Oil lobbyists. 

The good ship Awareness has long sailed.

Activists’ ‘awareness’ addiction

Greenpeace deserve its reputation as a climate activism pioneer.

Ask anyone what climate activism looks like, and (along with Greta Thunberg at a microphone) they’re likely to think of Greenpeace activists dangling off oil rigs, being fired at by whalers, or boarded by gun-toting men from looming petro-state warships.

But Greenpeace also exemplifies the lingering appeal of ‘awareness-raising’ in an age of instant awareness.

The first four minutes of Greenpeace East Asia’s 4’20” video  Taiwan: The Hidden Cost of AI Chips are excellent. The video exposes a little-discussed aspect of the AI boom – the environmental consequences for the local communities in Taiwan where the chips are made. It:

• has the production values and editorial gravitas of a mainstream news feature
• headlines pollution and health issues rather than the kind of climate consequences, which induce many ordinary viewers to switch off lest they feel ‘lectured’
• weaves in ecological, emissions and sustainability implications without using many of ‘green’ trigger words
• scores a See Through C-Bomb rating (where C is for Climate or Carbon) of three out of four (i.e. it only mentions ‘green’ words ‘sometimes’) 
• deftly targets See Through’s ‘Unwilling Inactivists’ category (i.e. the 89% who accept the science and reality of human-induced climate change but feel powerless to do anything about it). 

Sophisticated storytelling, for four minutes. But having done such a splendid job of ‘raising awareness’ for the first four minutes, the final call to action is:

It’s time the AI giants listened.

What is your message to them?

Tell us in the comments.

As a call to action, this is bordering on defeatist. 

• How will we make the AI giants listen? 
• Why ask to tell ‘us’ your comments.?
• Why aim so low as a ‘comment’ anyway? Comments require no response.
• What’s wrong with a ‘demand’, ‘deadline’, ‘ultimatum’, or even an ‘appeal’?

Even if the video ticks its declared boxes, it will have failed. 

By failing to link action to awareness, this Greenpeace video falls into the same trap as thousands of previous such videos and campaigns. So often, brilliant storytellers do all the hard work to stoke Unwilling Activists into a state of righteous outrage, only to fail to deliver a final meaningful call to action.

Notably, many are funded by businesses that don’t really want a change to business as usual.

It’s like watching a boxer dancing and weaving, ducking and bobbing, jabbing, hooking and uppercutting for ten rounds, only to walk away before landing the knockout punch.

Unintended consequences of awareness-raising

‘Awareness’, evidenced by ‘comments’, produces no measurable outcome. By contrast, the carbon cost of online activity can be measured. 

Views, shares, clicks, likes and comments are the favoured metrics of our Silicon Valley Overlords. They clock up engagement in the Attention Economy. They make them money. They generate emissions.

Social media engagement is, of course, a reasonable proxy for ‘awareness’, but climate activists should be ‘aware’ that ‘awareness’ comes at a climate cost to offset against any non-measurable outcomes – like ‘raised awareness’.

In the measurable world of physics, we know for sure that more engagement leads to Google’s data centres heating up more, more energy and water being required to cool them, more demand being created, and more chips being made in Taiwan. 

To be clear, this is not an argument for climate activists not to use social media. The Internet’s free infrastructure is one of the most effective tools available for smart storytellers to have real-world impact. 

But its emissions consequences are an inconvenient truth climate activists should be ‘aware’ of themselves. Big Oil generates emissions, but so do social media reach and engagement.

Without a clear call to action that leads to measurable reductions, even the most successful awareness-raising campaigns contribute, measurably, to the problem they seek to solve.

Linking climate awareness to action

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