Climate crisis: haven’t we heard it all before?

Every year, like clockwork, when summer temperatures rise, so does the topic of climate change, emerging from its communicative hibernation. We've grown accustomed to and adapted to warmer, snowless winters. We actually find fewer freezing days quite pleasant. But in the summer, the problems are more visible and have become our reality: massive wildfires, rapidly melting glaciers, record-breaking ocean temperatures, and repeated emergency calls for firefighters due to severe storms.

Despite the regularity of these events, something feels different this year. It started as a hunch: I noticed a drop in interest in my lectures and fewer interview requests. My colleagues shared similar experiences. Now, studies are confirming it: interest in the climate crisis is not just a feeling; it's measurably declining. In 2024 alone, coverage on major US television networks dropped by 25% compared to the previous year. Worldwide, daily newspapers saw an average decline of 16%. This decrease in media presence is a symptom of a broader societal “climate fatigue.” Researchers at the University of Oxford, in a 2024 international study, called it "Climate Perception Inertia." You could argue that we, as climate and environmental scientists, just have to accept that public interest shifts and our topics won’t always be front and center. But the problem is that this climate fatigue is now influencing political decisions. On both a regional and European level, the minimal climate goals from previous years are being weakened, not to mention how the actions of the Trump administration are undermining past efforts.

This fatigue isn’t because the situation is any less urgent; on the contrary, it’s more urgent than ever. Nor is it due to a lack of information. For years, data on rising CO2 concentrations, sea levels, and the increasing frequency of local storms has been freely available in real-time on our phones, from open-access scientific papers to clear, easy-to-understand graphics. We’re in a paradoxical situation: we face a growing threat, have never been so well-informed about it, yet we are either not reacting or are reacting too slowly. Scientists have tried to raise awareness about the dangers and solutions in every possible way, from being overly cautious – fearing being labeled alarmist – to being part of loud protests like the “Last Generation” group. No matter how you look at it, everything has basically already been said.

There are many well-researched reasons for this seemingly irrational behavior. It’s clear that other, more immediate crises are overshadowing the climate, and that disinformation campaigns by special interest groups are at play. But it’s questionable whether these reasons alone can explain our “Climate Perception Inertia.” Perhaps this almost unbearable slowness with which society is responding to one of the biggest challenges in its history is rooted much deeper, in our very biology.

The consequences of our emissions are heavily delayed because of the climate system’s inertia. This means our actions don’t have an immediate, obvious reaction, so we don’t get a clear warning signal. When damage from climate disasters isn’t covered by insurance, it’s often externalized to the public through disaster relief and emergency aid. But even when we understand the consequences of our actions rationally, it’s hard for us to break our established routines and habits. Like a child caught doing something wrong, we instinctively come up with plausible-sounding excuses and shift the blame. This pattern of rationalization is visible in individuals and across entire economic sectors: the tourism industry blames the customer, agriculture points to the need for food production, and other industries cite job creation. Elected officials pass climate protection measures back to citizen councils and justify their slow action by claiming they need to bring everyone along. You don’t see this pattern with other necessary decisions, like tax increases or raising the retirement age. These millions-of-years-old behaviors even apply to us researchers. But all those energy-intensive petaFLOPS of computing power, exabytes of data, and countless conferences are for a good cause, right? Ultimately, the climate on the verge of a tipping point doesn’t care if a CO2 molecule comes from a plane carrying climate scientists or one carrying Taylor Swift.

If you consider democratic decision-making as a cross-section of human will, it makes sense why this fundamental achievement of society is struggling to deal with the climate crisis. To put it very bluntly, you can’t solve physical equations with majority votes and compromises. We learned this painful lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic, where we had to quickly grasp the meaning of exponential growth curves. To prevent hospitals being overwhelmed, we had to resort to short-term emergency orders.

It’s also about a simple search for happiness. Our brains reward us for positive experiences. That’s one reason we love movies with happy endings. The climate story is currently heading in the opposite direction, which makes it extremely unappealing.

So, humanity’s hesitation is quite understandable. We are programmed to deal with immediate problems and put off less urgent matters. This trait has been a positive evolutionary advantage up to now, but it is counterproductive for solving the climate crisis. What if humans are simply not equipped to solve problems like this? It’s not that we can’t understand them; the consequences– for all their complexity – can be summed up in a few sentences. Rapidly rising temperatures lead to a loss of resources like living space, food, and drinking water. Just as with every living organism, humans are subject to the ecological principle of “carrying capacity,” – the maximum number of individuals an environment can support. Fewer resources lower this carrying capacity, leading to increased competition and death rates, or a lower birth rate.

From this perspective, the current trend is tragic from a human standpoint, but from a scientific one, it’s part of the normal course of events. What is truly remarkable, though, is that over billions of years, from single-celled organisms to highly-bred pocket puppies, humans are the only species that knowingly drives the reduction of their own resources. This gives the term “Homo sapiens” a new, almost tragicomic twist.

The solution to the climate crisis is being delayed, in part, because it may fundamentally be a confrontation with the deepest nature of humanity itself. So it’s understandable that some of my colleagues are now calling this “being human” stupid and lazy, or are resignedly considering a retreat from science. The pattern is reminiscent of the bourgeoisie’s retreat at the Fin de Siècle in anticipation of the First World War. Shrugging shoulders and saying, “We told you so,” is more than tempting given the current situation and all our efforts over the past decades. However, this is a sure path to a communicative dead end. And the question remains: as a scientist, what conclusion can I draw from these thoughts for the future of climate communication?

1. Learning from others is always helpful. Advertisers and politicians have long known that people respond far better to stories than to facts. This may run counter to the objectivity of our profession, but it’s a fact that in the early summer of 2025, rainbow flags (to at least somewhat justify the over-the-top title of this article) generated far more emotion and attention than the record level of atmospheric CO2. Communicating with glaciers as emotionally charged witnesses of the past is a good idea. However, their melting is so far removed from the daily lives of most people in the Global North that their symbolic power for global warming has largely fizzled out. Perhaps we should try different slogans. Self-determination, maximum individual freedom at the lowest possible price are emotionally charged buzzwords that are everywhere in advertising, political campaigns, and influencer videos. Don’t these ideas fit perfectly with renewable energy? One approach could be to communicate less directly about climate and emissions and more indirectly about economic viability and independence. If we can produce renewable energy locally, why are we in the EU still so willing to send hundreds of billions of euros to politically questionable states, making ourselves vulnerable to their demands?

2. We have to assume that a complete reduction of greenhouse gases isn’t possible, even with the best intentions and rapid implementation. Food production for eight or nine billion people will still create greenhouse gases through the use of fertilizers and the unavoidable need for livestock farming in climatically unfavorable regions. At the same time, studies show that the CO2 absorption capacity of soils has been greatly overestimated. We must therefore continue to emphasize that we really need new technologies to capture greenhouse gases directly at their source or from the atmosphere in general. This focus on innovation is rightly met with skepticism because it can distract us from preventing emissions and because these technologies may take a long time to become available. But if we want to stabilize the climate at a tolerable level, we also need to pursue a technological leap forward. Humans are also – in addition to all the traits described – curious and social beings who compare and compete with each other. Perhaps we can use this trait better in our communication to inspire more innovation, idea competitions, and a forward-looking attitude with inspiring role models.

3. Despite all this positive openness to technology, we must face reality. As long as greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rise, catastrophic climate extremes become ever more likely. This means we must also shift some of our communication time and resources from climate protection to climate adaptation. Flood control and irrigation are simple examples of how we can raise the carrying capacity mentioned earlier. But change goes far beyond that to long-term social adaptations like regulating migration, dealing with fake news, and distributing resources. Rapidly rising temperatures will inevitably lead to social conflicts due to scarcer resources. Therefore, climate communication on adaptation must not only demand protection from material damage but also, in the long run, the timely protection of our humanistic achievements.

4. It remains the job of science to be honest with society. There is nothing to sugarcoat, especially not for “educational” reasons. We have already irreversibly decimated the basis of our lives for several hundred years. The Paris climate goal is very likely unattainable, as a 2024 report from the UN Environment Program UNEP shows. But this doesn’t mean the world will end at 1.6 degrees of warming. What remains for us today is a choice between an uncomfortable future and a catastrophic one. Every tenth of a degree between these two options determines whether we cross climate tipping points or have enough food. A study by US agricultural scientists confirms this. This message is less catchy than the 1.5-degree target, but it’s the second-best option we have. Science has no choice but to repeat, over and over, that emissions must come down. This isn’t particularly glamorous. We’d rather be discovering, inventing, and exploring new frontiers than losing society’s interest by repeating ourselves. But this is exactly where our evolution offers a chance we can use for climate communication: humans learn through repetition.

Yes, everything has been said. But not often enough.