Stop Pretending Climate Change Is Simple

Navigating the Three Visions of our Climate Future

We’re not really prepared for a cognitive challenge like climate change…

There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes from working in climate. It’s the feeling of staring at a mountain of data that is so vast, so contradictory, and so high-stakes that your brain tries to find an emergency exit. We crave a simple story to tell us where we’re going, but the story is splitting in three directions. Depending on who you talk to—and which data set they’re clutching—the trajectory we’re on is either pretty darn bad, not that bad, or truly horrible.

Pretty darn bad is the mainstream view. It’s the consensus among scientists who contribute to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change. Pretty-darn-badders say that we’re on track to miss the Paris Agreement targets, reaching somewhere between 2.5 and 3.0 degrees of warming by 2100, which will mean the effective end of coral reefs as we know them, a doubling or even tripling of the frequency of extreme heat waves in many regions, and sea levels rising enough to threaten the homes of hundreds of millions of people in coastal cities. They note that this trajectory is nowhere near as bad as the 4 or even 5 degrees of warming that seemed plausible at the start of the century, and that for most of the people in the world this means challenging-but-survivable conditions. No bed of roses, but not armageddon, either.

But this mainstream view has challengers on both sides.

Some absolutely serious researchers argue our trajectory is really Not that bad. This view is advanced guys like Ted Nordhaus, Bjorn Lomborg, Roger Pielke Jr. and Chris Wright who find it pretty easy to poke holes in some of the more alarmist activist discourses out there.

Not-that-badders acknowledge climate change is real and that it is a problem, but they stress that actual climate harms have grown much less quickly than mainstream discourses suggest, because economic growth is extremely effective at enabling people and communities to adapt to a changing climate. Not-that-badders dwell on the 99% drop in annual deaths from climate-related disasters over the last century and the fact that we are currently spending a much smaller percentage of global GDP on weather-related damage than we used to. From this Ecomodernist point of view, climate change is well within the range of things human societies can and do protect themselves from effectively all the time. Late last year, the not-that-badders scored a major tactical victory when Bill Gates publicly joined their ranks.

Then there are critics who think our climate trajectory is Truly horrible. This is the smallest band, but it matters because its leading exponent, James Hansen, is among the world’s foremost climate scientists.

Truly-horriblers argue that standard climate models consistently underestimate the impact changing albedo has for temperature trajectories, which is why climate models can’t account for the acceleration in global warming we’ve seen these last few years. Sometimes called “climate accelerationists,” truly-horriblers point out that the loss of cloud condensation nuclei from maritime shipping pollution has led to unexpected spikes in sea-surface temperatures, and note that the massive acceleration in the Earth’s energy imbalance and the historical evidence that sea levels once rose several meters per century under similar conditions suggest we’re on track for a much more unstable climate than the mainstream expects. The credibility of the climate accelerationists suffer from association with some of the shrillest, most unhinged activist voices in the climate movement. Because they sound crazy, we tend to think they must be crazy. They’re not, though: they’ve got data to sling.

Hindsight is a trap

When you work in climate, people are constantly trying to pin you down to one of these groups. I find that frustrating, because all three make good points. All three are engaged in a good-faith effort to bring some clarity to an extraordinarily confusing mass of hard-to-interpret data. All three put forward views that are cogent and plausible.

I, for one, find myself shifting between their perspectives several times a day.

Come 2100, only one of these groups will have turned out to be right. In hindsight, the temptation will be to ascribe superior wisdom and insight to that group and condemn the other two as fools or knaves. Because Hindsight Bias is powerful. Once you know how a story turned out in the end, it seems obvious to you that that it ought to have been foreseeable from the start.

Hindsight Bias is a mirage, though. As of 2026, it’s genuinely impossible to say if the climate trajectory we’re on is pretty darn bad, not that bad, or truly horrible.

My guess is that the future will probably be weirder than any of these perspectives can capture. We may well live through a bizarre mash-up of all three. Maybe temperatures will shoot up as fast as the climate accelerationists are expecting, but we’ll turn out to be able to adapt to them relatively easily, as the ecomodernists expect.

Or maybe we’ll actually nail our emissions targets and keep warming to a ‘mainstream’ 2 degrees, but then we’ll find out global financial and political systems are way more brittle than we thought. Maybe a few mid-sized crop failures trigger a domino effect of state collapses and migration crises that look like a ‘truly horrible’ outcome despite ‘not that bad’ temperatures.

Alternatively, we could see a future where the planet warms significantly, but we ‘cheat’ the thermostat by figuring out how to manage solar radiation. We’d end up with a climate that is physically cool but ecologically and politically freaky, a world where the weather is ‘fine’ but ocean acidification is out of control, and where we’re one technical glitch (or a war) away from ‘termination shock’ and instant, catastrophic heating.

Getting bogged down on which of the three camps is ‘right’ misses the point.

The overwhelming reality we have to deal with is dominated by deep uncertainty: the fundamental unknowability of which trajectory we’re on, and the havoc that uncertainty plays with any attempt to nail down a reasonable policy response.

Faced with an amorphous threat we can’t necessarily nail down, can’t quantify exactly, consensus will remain elusive.

The mainstream, the ecomodernists and the accelerationists all make reasonable arguments on the basis of scientific data. The data is so vast and messy that you can use it to build almost any story you want. (This, to his credit, is something Pielke acknowledges often.)

For me, really getting into climate has been about appreciating just how deep the uncertainty goes, and how those uncertainties then go on to distort the climate debate.

Because we’re all human. We all come to this emotionally charged discussion with strong prior beliefs: ecological priors, economic priors, and also political priors. And those priors bleed through to our ideas of what a reasonable climate response might be. Of course they do!

We aren’t just looking at the data; we’re looking at it through the lens of who we are. If you’re a ‘market guy,’ you’re going to find Pielke’s adaptation data much more ‘reasonable’ than Hansen’s acceleration data. If you’re an anti-capitalist, the ‘truly horrible’ scenario feels like the vindication you’ve been waiting for all along. The temptation to think the storyline that jives with your identity must be right is massive.

Writing Charlatans, one thing that became very clear to me is that the tendency to interpret incomplete, confusing data in line with our priors is overwhelming. Social psychologists call it “motivated reasoning” — when we reason backwards, starting from the conclusion we want to reach to the arguments that will make it compatible with the data.

In the climate sphere, motivated reasoning is rampant. Because climate maxes out all the risk factors for motivated reasoning. We’re having complex debates about difficult-to-measure variables at unfamiliar scales all bearing directly on politically polarized questions. Hundreds of thousands of climate papers are published each year, yielding a mass of often contradictory information that you could use to sustain basically any conclusion.

Is it any wonder that when ideological conservatives make a good faith effort to try to evaluate this hugely confusing mass of material, they come to conclusions diametrically opposed to those ideological leftists reach?

Is there a better way?

For the last year, I’ve been puzzling through what a reasonable, defensible response to climate change looks like from a position that does not fall into the traps motivated reasoning sets for us.

How would we respond to climate change if we acknowledged, frankly, the uncertainties and the cognitive pitfalls that make this whole subject so tricky? How do you sidestep motivated reasoning and make decisions that make sense under deep uncertainty? And how do we do this in a world where climate money is drying up and where public appetite for costly responses is on the wane?

These aren’t easy questions.

A world where the mainstream and both its critics are all making reasonable points is a world that will tax our cognitive resources to their limits. It’s ok to be confused. It’s okay not to have the answers. Climate change is a challenge unlike any we’ve ever met before.

We need a place where we can acknowledge the vertigo. Where it’s okay to admit economic growth might be our best defense, even if you’re appalled at what we’ve done to the atmosphere. Where it’s safe to talk out what level of risk we’re really willing to bear if we decide the extra carbon belongs in the deep ocean, or that we’re better off sidestepping the entire mess by making the stratosphere more reflective.

I want One Percent Brighter to be a place where the camps are less fixed, less embattled, and less static. We shouldn’t have to decide if we’re in the ‘pretty darn bad,’ ‘not that bad,’ or ‘truly horrible’ camp just to have a seat at the table. This shit is complicated. And there’s no myth out there worse than the idea that it’s simple.