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PODCAST

Your Brain On Climate

Psychology vs climate change: what we think, why we think it, and how it all adds up to a planet-sized emergency. Each episode host Dave Powell interviews experts in how our brains work - from PhDs in psychology to writers, activists and beyond. They"ll talk about how their brains and our brains do (and don"t) work, and how all of that might help make sense of the climate crisis - and possibly what to do about it.

science earth sciences

All Episodes

9:20

Change It Up

Your Brain On Climate ·

2026/01/01

Happy New Year! And before your resolutions crumble into ash, here's a short episode about why change is hard - but yet it's the only thing we ever really do. Back in 2021 I chatted to Andrew Simms about change: how humans constantly trip the fandango between wanting to upend everything, and to keep things exactly the same. Tragedies are written about it. And yet in a world where it can feel like not enough is changing fast enough, sometimes we don't stop to notice the huge changes happ...

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54:57

The Weather People, with Helen Roberts

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/12/14

Predicting the weather is really hard, not least because of all those butterflies in the Amazon flapping their wings about. So an even-vaguely-right forecast is a scientific marvel and a masterclass in risk communication. And how people do and don't take it in is a similarly fascinating dive into human brains and how they deal (or don't) with uncertainty. But these days you can't talk about our changing weather without talking about our changing climate - even if (too) many people stil...

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13:08

How to talk about the climate emergency

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/12/01

A new campaign, the National Emergency Briefing, thinks (rightly) there's a climate emergency going on. They want Keir Starmer to go on TV and tell the nation, like Boris did with Covid. But would that work? Do people think about climate change the same as other types of 'emergency'? In this Micro episode I chat to climate comms guru Adam Corner about the similarities - and differences - between climate emergencies and the Covid emergency. After a snippet of my 2021 chat him, I dial him...

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70:22

Into the Manosphere

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/11/16

There's a vast online universe where men hang out and hate on women. This is the 'Manosphere', a place home to hucksters, spivs, scam artists and some of the worst humans alive. But it's also a honeytrap for millions of lost boys simply looking for a story about the world that makes sense. You start out looking for fitness tips or how to get a girlfriend. You end up believing climate change is made up and Donald Trump is a hero. How does this online radicalisation happen? What do...

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14:29

Spooky 👻

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/10/30

It's Halloween, when everyone is allowed to be strange for a day. A good time to ask: like the best ghost stories, why does climate change sometimes feel so uncanny? And what happens when the world we take for granted starts to feel ... haunted? In this Micro episode, a snippet of my 2021 chat with psychogeographer and author, Philippa Holloway. You can listen to the full interview here or in the back catalogue. Please do consider chipping in a couple of quid over at http://www.pa...

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54:25

Is Climate Anxiety real?

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/10/15

Well... is it? Nearly half of young people say the future of the planet brings them mental distress. Not just young people either. More and more people of all ages are feeling something that feels like the thing we call climate anxiety. And for good reason: things not very brill, planet-wise. But is climate anxiety something distinct from other worries? Is it just the latest snowflakey expression of more generally held worries about the future? Is it a mental health problem, or a socia...

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11:07

MICRO: Change Blindness

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/09/29

Climate change: fast in a geological sense, but slow in a second-by-second human-perception sense. Our brains stop paying attention to things that change (relatively) slowly. This is 'change blindness' - and it's why we need laws and leadership that prioritise our shifting climate, because our brains struggle to. In this MICRO episode, a snippet of my 2022 chat with neuroscientist and author, Professor Anil Seth. You can listen to the full interview here or in the back catalogue. ...

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59:35

Don’t Fear The Reaper, with Molly Conisbee

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/09/16

I'm afraid that you are going to die. Sorry. You can imagine afterlives and amass great hordes of wealth, but you're still made of human stuff, and thus will die. Humanity's inability to get its head around this most inconvenient of truths is probably behind most of the silly pointless stuff we do, from rampant consumption to wars to spaceships to conjuring up Gods. Joining me on this episode of Your Brain on Climate is Molly Conisbee - author of No Ordinary Deaths, a social histo...

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10:49

MICRO: Optimism Bias

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/08/29

Thing about humans is, we like to look on the bright side of life. Without optimism, we'd not have evolved out of the trees in the first place. Our species has optimism bias. But we're all different, and some of us are a little bit too wired to be over-optimistic - and vice versa. This has big impacts for the messages we see about climate change. In this MICRO episode, a snippet of my forthcoming chat with Professor Geoff Beattie. What did he learn when he put optimistic and pess...

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50:43

Violence, with Peter Schwartzstein

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/08/17

Climate change sucks, not least when it causes violence - which it does more than you'd think. In a hundred ways it can add stress and trauma to brains already under huge pressure, and when that's all finally a bit much - well, the worse demons of our nature can, and do, come out. Grim. But are we doomed? Does it have to be like that? Can environmental peacebuilding turn climate violence into an engine of cooperation? Or is human nature a more powerful force when the chips are down, whi...

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11:06

MICRO: Laughing Matter

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/07/30

Comedy opens the mind and helps us cope with the sheer strangeness of being alive. But is climate change a suitable topic for comedy? In this micro episode of Your Brain on Climate, I chat to Stuart Goldsmith - stand-up par excellence and host of the Comedian's Comedian podcast - about what he's learned from trying to to do jokes about the state of the planet. If you liked this episode, here's the full chat with Stuart from back in 2023. I use a clip from Stuart's set on Live at t...

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59:59

They F*** You Up, Your Mum & Dad

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/07/13

How should you bring up baby in the age of climate breakdown? Should you tell them what's happening or not? And given how messed up is the planet we're passing on - is it even fair to *have* kids? In a YBOC first this episode is a 3-way chat. Dave meets Nina Alexandersen and Sophia Cheng - respectively someone who became a climate activist through fear for her kid's future, and someone whose activism made them very ambivalent about becoming a mum, until something changed. We talk ...

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59:00

Somewhere, with Karl Dudman

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/06/13

We vote in our self interest, right? So how come people living on islands disappearing because of climate change - and they know it - keep voting for Donald Trump? The answer to that goes to the heart of our climate politics. But it also tells us something very important about how different people think about climate change and what should be done about it, even when they can see it literally killing the place they love. This episode is a fascinating chat with anthropologist Dr Ka...

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9:24

MICRO: Kill All Pests

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/05/30

I'm out in the garden looking for that pile of jobby I found the other day, and it made me think back to my chat in episode 17 with Erica McAlister all about flies (and fleas). Erica is the London Natural History Museum's expert on all things dipeteric (flies) and siphonapteric (fleas), and an extremely funny and nice person too. Reaching for that fly-killer? WAIT A MINUTE. Must we call kill all pests? (Must we even think of them as pests in the first place?) If you like the...

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57:20

Bullsh*t, with Mike Berners-Lee

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/05/11

An episode all about the subtle art of talking bollocks. We live in a golden age of bullshit. It can seem that our politics is riddled with it. Corporate climate communications are drenched in it. And despite the looming eco-crisis, perhaps our own brains are too. In this episode, Dave meets author Mike Berners-Lee to chew over his new book, A Climate of Truth. It's a brilliant balance of home truths about the state of things, with unputdownable optimism that humanity can - and mu...

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11:04

MICRO: You Disgust Me

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/04/27

In this bite-sized edition we look back at perhaps my favouritest episode ever - episode 9 about disgust, with Yoel Inbar. We all have a gag reflex. But when we find people - like polluters - disgusting, are we feeing *actually* disgusted, or is it just a metaphor? What about how we might feel about things like climate change itself? Does it make us want, literally, to vom? If you like the show please do consider chipping in a couple of quid over at http://www.patreon.com/yourbrainoncli...

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60:00

I Contain Multitudes, with Sarah Stein Lubrano

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/04/16

An episode all about cognitive dissonance. Ever feel like there are two yous in the same head? The one that cares about the planet, and the one that doesn't act like it does? And that having two yous makes at least one of your yous freak out? You (and you) are not alone. Welcome to cognitive dissonance. As Walt Whitman wrote: you contain multitudes. It's a feature, not a bug, of being alive. Humans, it turns out, are very good at thinking conflicting things at the same time....

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9:47

MICRO: Running Up That Hill

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/03/28

In this YBOC microdose, a hark back to my inspirational chat with ultrarunner and climate activist Damian Hall, who dispensed his wisdom about how to keep up the slog - advice that's as useful for changing the world as it is for running up that hill. Sorting climate change is the definition of a marathon, not a sprint. It particularly feels that way right now. What we need is ENDURANCE, and plenty of it - and the right perspective to keep on keeping on. For the full chat, check o...

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53:48

Confirmation Bias, with Adam Harris

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/03/10

Or: why we all hear what we want to hear, and disregard the rest. Confirmation bias is hardwired into human brains, and without it we'd never get through our day. But it doesn't half get us - and the planet - into trouble sometimes. In this episode Dave learns all about confirmation bias from the splendid Professor Adam Harris off of University College London. Learn about how casinos make their cash, why lefties should read righty-press sometimes, why confirmation bias once c...

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9:56

MICRO: The Conservative Lag

Your Brain On Climate ·

2025/02/27

Why is social change so hard - particularly right now? Part of the reason likes in pluralistic ignorance - the social phenomena that helps to explains everything from imposter syndrome to slow progress on climate change. In this micro episode, we explore a nugget of insight from Professor Deborah Prentice - currently vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and at the time of our chat back in 2021, provost of Princeton. What is pluralistic ignorance, and how does it lead to a 'cons...

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58 results

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