In a June 24, 2025, interview published in the Guardian Weekly on July 4, 2025, climate expert Genevieve Guenther discussed the reality of climate tipping points and the importance of correcting misleading narratives that downplay climate risks. She highlighted the need for honest public discourse about potential catastrophic risks and countered the false narrative that the climate threat is under control...........‘This is a fight for life’: climate expert on tipping points, doomerism and using wealth as a shield. Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve Guenther. Guardian Jonathan Watts Tue 24 Jun 2025 Climate breakdown can be observed across many continuous, incremental changes such as soaring carbon dioxide levels, rising seas and heating oceans. The numbers creep up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. But scientists have also identified at least 16 “tipping points” – thresholds where a tiny shift could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with potentially devastating effects. These shifts can interact with each other and create feedback loops that heat the planet further or disrupt weather patterns, with unknown but potentially catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. It is possible some tipping points may already have been passed. Dr Genevieve Guenther, an American climate communications specialist, is the founding director of End Climate Silence, which studies the representation of global heating in the media and public discourse. Last year, she published The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, which was described by Bill McKibben as “a gift to the world”. In the run-up to the Global Tipping Points conference in July, Guenther talks to the Guardian about the need to discuss catastrophic risks when communicating about the climate crisis.The climate crisis is pushing globally important ecosystems – ice sheets, coral reefs, ocean circulation and the Amazon rainforest – towards the point of no return.
Why is it important to talk about tipping points?....... We need to correct a false narrative that the climate threat is under control. These enormous risks are potentially catastrophic. They would undo the connections between human and ecological systems that form the basis of all of our civilisation.
How have attitudes changed towards these dangers?.........There was a constructive wave of global climate alarm in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on 1.5C in 2018. That was the first time scientists made it clear that the difference between 1.5C and 2C would be catastrophic for millions of people and that in order to halt global heating at a relatively safe level, we would need to start zeroing out our emissions almost immediately. Until then, I don’t think policymakers realised the timeline was that short. This prompted a flurry of activism – Greta Thunberg and Indigenous and youth activists – and a surge of media attention. All of this converged to make almost everybody feel that climate change was a terrifying and pressing problem. This prompted new pledges, new corporate sustainability targets, and new policies being passed by government. This led to a backlash by those in the climate movement who prefer to cultivate optimism. Their preferred solution was to drive capitalist investment into renewable technologies so fossil fuels could be beaten out of the marketplace. This group believed climate fear might drive away investors, so they started to argue it was counterproductive to talk about worst-case scenarios. Some commentators even argued we had averted the direst predictions and were now on a more reassuring trajectory of global warming of a little under 3C by 2100. But it is bananas to feel reassured by that because 3C would be a totally catastrophic outcome for humanity. Even at the current level of about 1.5C, the impacts of warming are emerging on the worst side of the range of possible outcomes and there is growing concern of tipping points for the main Atlantic Ocean circulation (Amoc), Antarctic sea ice, corals and rainforests. If the risk of a plane crashing was as high as the risk of the Amoc collapsing, none of us would ever fly because they would not let the plane take off. And the idea that our little spaceship, our planet, is under the risk of essentially crashing and we’re still continuing business as usual is mindblowing. I think part of the problem is that people feel distant from the dangers and don’t realise the children we have in our homes today are threatened with a chaotic, disastrous, unliveable future. Talking about the risks of catastrophe is a very useful way to overcome this kind of false distance.
In your book, you write that it’s appropriate to be scared and the more you know, the more likely you are to be worried, as is evident from the statements of scientists and the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres. Why?....... Some people at the centre of the media, policymaking and even research claim that climate change isn’t going to be that bad for those who live in the wealthy developed world – the UK, Europe and the United States. When you hear these messages, you are lulled into a kind of complacency and it seems reasonable to think that we can continue to live as we do now without putting ourselves, our families, our communities under threat within decades. What my book is designed to do is wake people up and raise the salience and support for phasing out fossil fuels. [It] is written for people who are already concerned about the climate crisis and are willing to entertain a level of anxiety. But the discourse of catastrophe would not be something I would recommend for people who are disengaged from the climate problem. I think that talking about catastrophe with those people can actually backfire because it’ll just either overwhelm them or make them entrench their positions. It can be too threatening.
A recent Yale study found that a degree of climate anxiety was not necessarily bad because it could stir people to collective action. Do you agree?...... It depends. I talk about three different kinds of doomerism. One is the despair that arises from misunderstanding the science and thinking we’re absolutely on the path to collapse within 20 or 30 years, no matter what we do. That is not true. Second, there’s a kind of nihilistic position taken by people who suggest they are the only ones who can look at the harsh truth. I have disdain for that position. Finally, there’s the doomerism that comes from political frustration, from believing that people who have power are just happy to burn the world down.......read on- there's much more https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2025/jun/24/tipping-points-climate-crisis-expert-doomerism-wealth
