Your Brain On Climate

Dinosaur Time

Come with me for a walk around Crystal Palace Park in London - home to the world's first ever life-sized models of dinosaurs, built in 1854.  It's hard enough

What Lies Beneath, with Renée Lertzman

You're a mature, rational adult who can face massive, existential problems head-on, right? Or is your brain more like a medieval dungeon: a deep dark place in which

The Psychology of Flying

Why do people who care about climate change still jet off on planes (including, occasionally, me?) This is an excerpt of me attempting to answer that surprisingly complic

The War on Net Zero, with Becca Massey-Chase

For most of the last two decades, the right of UK politics were all for climate action. Heck, in 2019 a Conservative Prime Minister signed us up to net zero emissions by

Thick Description

If you've ever caught yourself writing off a  group of people with a simple and dismissive description of why they do what they do - or been thusly written off yours

The Activist Script, with Anthea Lawson

I am good. I protest. I save people. I must save the world - now.  If this even slightly feels like something you've told yourself, then this episode is for you.  A

In Praise of Being Bored

When's the last time you were bored? Thanks to our phones, it's easier than ever to be distracted, stimulated, and fed attention calories of varying quality so

The Pilot who Quit for the Climate, with Joel Walker

In this episode I go for a walk in the woods with a former airline pilot who packed it in because of his climate anxiety. Joel Walker flew for years but could never quite

Discounting the Future

Would you rather have a fiver today or a tenner this time next year? That kind of calculation is called 'discounting', and the more you'd rather have the f

Use Your Fear, with Sarah Jaquette Ray

Climate change is REALLY SCARY, right, but that doesn't mean you have to wibble helplessly in the corner. While the go-to currency of most climate awareness campaign

The Dutch have a word for your flimsy excuses

A few years ago I learned the Dutch word 'goedprater': the excuses we give to justify something to others, which we can barely justify to ourselves. I do it all

Hope, with Pancho Lewis

Hope! What is it good for? (Absolutely every'thin).  We ain't doing much about the climate crisis without it. Movements are founded on it, and most campaigns a

Eat a Proper Lunch

Your brain is literally made of the food you eat. And *how* you eat it - slowly, or wolfed down at your desk - will affect how well you digest it. So way before any of th

Fear of Numbers, with Rob Eastaway

The history of humans arguing about climate change is often just people throwing large numbers at each other. So it's time for an episode about how we think about nu

Bonus episode: Climate Magic, featuring me

I recently had the honour of being interviewed about what I've learned from 4+ years of doing this show - about human brains vs the climate crisis and how to bring t

The Weight of Nature, with Clayton Page Aldern

Brain-eating amoebae are only the start of it. Just you wait until Clayton Aldern talks you through the ways big and small that climate change is changing what it means t

Change It Up

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. 

Forecasting the Weather, with Helen Roberts

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 scienti

How to talk about the climate emergency

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

The Manosphere, with James Bloodworth

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 t