The smiling young woman approaches me, hand outstretched to shake mine. “I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your talk,” she enthuses. I thank her warmly; I’m as grateful for a compliment as the next person. But my heart is sinking. I’ve failed, again. The “enjoyable” talk I’ve just delivered was about climate change and its impacts, now and in the future – planetary catastrophe in a 40-minute PowerPoint presentation. And now the audience is filing out, eager for a coffee or something stronger, already thinking about where to get a taxi, or what to have for dinner, or any one of a million things other than mounting a revolution to save the planet.
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| Professor Lesley Hughes. |
I give a lot of these talks – to university students, business groups, community organisations, anyone who’ll listen. I work hard to be engaging, keeping the text and complex graphs to a minimum, adding lots of pictures and analogies, personal anecdotes and even the odd joke. And therein lies the conundrum. As a scientist I feel a compulsion to deliver the facts as we currently understand them. But too much gloom and doom is paralysing. Apocalypse fatigue can send people under the metaphorical doona.
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