Your Brain On Climate
Dave Powell
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About This Podcast
A show about climate change and climate psychology. But sideways. Explore human brains doing amazing or awful things, learn why, then see what it means for the planet.
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Recent Episodes
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 you never have to worry about being…
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 ignore the state of the…
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 fiver today, the more you are discounting the…
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 campaigns is 'hope' – does fear get a bad…
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 the time and I bet you do too, whether…
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 are about wanting us to feel it. Which is…
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 the psychology stuff, getting a…
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 numbers, why our brains are prone to…
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 them closer together. This is me on…
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 to be you. From your mood to…
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. Back in 2021 I chatted to Andrew Simms…
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 scientific marvel and a masterclass…
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 Boris did with Covid. But would…
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 the worst humans alive. But it's also a…
Spooky 👻
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…
Is Climate Anxiety real? with Geoff Beattie
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…
Change Blindness
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…
Fear of Death, with Molly Conisbee
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…
Optimism Bias
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…
Climate Violence, with Peter Schwartzstein
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…
Frequently Asked Questions
Your Brain On Climate has published 68 episodes since July 2021, covering topics in Earth Sciences, Health & Fitness.
Your Brain On Climate is currently highly active with new episodes every 2 weeks. Average episode length is 50m.
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