A practical, no-jargon guide to having real climate conversations that actually change minds.
Frameworks that work no matter who you're talking to
What to say (and what to avoid) in 2026
Seven modules covering every climate conversation you'll have
Your cashier at the grocery store says the climate has always changed. Your fellow attendee at the Rotary Club event says we have 300 years, don't worry about it. Your colleague at work says we're all doomed anyway.
10 years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio won his first Oscar and used his acceptance speech to call climate change the most urgent threat facing our species. That speech got me working in climate. I'm reflecting on a decade of climate conversations and wrote this guide to speed others in the quest for a stable climate.
In my years of climate work, I've found there are seven questions, the same seven questions, in every conversation about climate, everywhere. Once you can see them, the whole landscape opens up. My aspiration is that this guide helps everyone get on the same page, so we can stop talking past each other and start figuring it out together.
Each module covers one question, what you'll hear, what's really going on, and what to watch for in yourself. It's a map. Instead of getting pissed off, you get curious, and that curiosity might help you learn something or even help someone take new actions.
This is a living document. The conversations change, the landscape shifts, and I keep learning. I'll keep updating this as I go.
Everyone is somewhere on this map. Find out where.
1. Know the map. Read the modules before you're in the conversation, not during. When someone says something that would spike your blood pressure, it won't land the same way if you already expected it. The difference between "I can't believe they just said that" and "ah, there it is" is everything.
2. See the person, not the position. Whatever someone says about climate, there's a reason that has almost nothing to do with atmospheric science. The modules below give you an idea of what might be going on, but don't assume. Ask. Get curious. You might be right about what's underneath, or you might discover something completely different. Either way, you learned something.
This isn't a guide about data. There are no charts, no statistics, nothing to "convince" anyone. This is a guide for you to listen and learn what the other person is actually talking about first. That shift alone will change everything.
And what you'll hear
This is the first line of defense, and it's almost never about data. The person saying this hasn't looked at temperature records and drawn a different conclusion. They're holding a position, and the position is doing something for them. It might be protecting them from having to rethink their politics. It might be loyalty to their community. It might be that admitting this one thing means the next ten things start falling, and they're not ready for that.
When you understand that, it stops being infuriating. This belief is load-bearing - it's holding up a bunch of other things they're not ready to deal with yet.
This is the one that will tempt you the most to argue, because it feels so obviously, provably wrong. The ten hottest years on record have all happened since 2015. It's right there. You'll want to say it. You'll want to pull out your phone.
Resist. Not because the facts don't matter, they do, but because the moment you start proving them wrong, something happens to you. You shift into debate mode. Your chest tightens. You start listening for openings instead of listening for understanding. And now you're in a fight, which is the one place this conversation can't go anywhere useful.
The fact that the climate is changing is not in question scientifically. But in this conversation, treating it as something you need to prove puts you on defense, and that's where you get hurt. You don't need them to concede the point right now. You need to get curious about why they're holding it.
That's the difference. In the first version, you learned nothing and you're burned out. In the second, you found something real you have in common with someone you thought you had nothing in common with, and you're still in the game.
This person has usually conceded, maybe quietly, maybe grudgingly, that yes, the climate is changing. But they've drawn a line: it's not us. And that line matters to them enormously, because if it's not us, then there's nothing to feel guilty about, nothing to change, no one to blame. "Natural cycles" isn't a scientific position. It's a relief valve.
There's something else here too. Accepting that humans caused this means accepting that the way we've built our economy, heated our homes, grown our food, and powered our lives for the past 150 years has been slowly breaking something. That's a heavy thing to sit with. For a lot of people, especially people whose livelihoods are connected to fossil fuels, or whose parents' and grandparents' were, it feels like you're saying their whole way of life was wrong. You're not. But it can feel that way.
This one's frustrating because the science is so clear. Over 99% of climate studies agree. Every national science academy on Earth agrees. The predictions made 30 years ago have come true. You know all this, and the temptation is to just unload it.
But this is also where you're most likely to accidentally moralize. The jump from "humans caused it" to "and you should feel bad" is short, and even if you don't say it, the other person will hear it. Watch yourself. The moment you start sounding like you're assigning blame, they'll stop listening, and you'll feel righteous, which is its own trap. Righteousness feels good but it doesn't move anyone.
Here's a real life example from my friend. Someone said: "Why isn't anyone talking about emissions from volcanoes?" Now, your instinct might be to jump in with the fact that human emissions outpace volcanic emissions by a factor of 100. And you'd be right. But look at what that person is actually doing. They're not being hostile. They're asking a question that feels reasonable to them, and they're wondering why the conversation seems to skip over it. If you come in with "actually, volcanoes are negligible," you've just told them their question was dumb. All they'll hear is that their question was dumb. But if you can see that they're genuinely trying to make sense of it, and they've landed on a piece of the puzzle that feels overlooked, you're in a completely different conversation. One where you're figuring it out together instead of correcting them.
That's the difference. In the first version, she's the problem. In the second, you understand the problem, and you can see that she's not your opponent. She's someone carrying something heavy.
This person has made it further than most. They accept the climate is changing and that humans have something to do with it. But they've landed on: it's not that big a deal. A couple of degrees? We'll figure it out. Technology will save us. It'll mostly hit places far away.
This is distancing. The impact of climate change is genuinely hard to feel at a personal level. It's slow, it's unevenly distributed, and it shows up as statistics: trillions of dollars in economic damage, hundreds of thousands of deaths from heat and wildfire smoke, insurance markets collapsing, crop yields shifting. Those numbers are real,2025 saw over $120 billion in climate disaster costs, but they're abstract. They don't feel like they're about you.
And honestly, for a lot of people in wealthy countries, they're right that the worst impacts hit somewhere else first. It's a quiet calculation that this isn't urgent for them yet.
This one can make you feel crazy. You know the scale is enormous, trillions in damage, millions of lives affected, entire ecosystems collapsing, and they're shrugging. The gap between what you know and what they feel can make you want to shake them.
But here's the thing: scale is genuinely hard to grasp. It's hard for everyone, including you. The difference between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees of warming doesn't sound like much, but it's the difference between losing most coral reefs and losing all of them. Between difficult adaptation and cascading failure. You know that intellectually, but can you feel it? Probably not fully. So cut them some slack, humans are bad at scale.
That's the difference. In the first version, you diagnosed apathy. In the second, you saw someone on the edge of connecting the dots, and you noticed the moment where it almost happened.
This person has already accepted the first three premises. The climate is changing, humans are causing it, and the impact is serious. They're past denial. They've actually done the harder emotional work of letting that in.
And it broke something. They looked at the scale of the problem and concluded there's no way out. The world is too big, the systems are too locked in, the politics are too broken. Caring hurts too much when you believe it's pointless. Fatalism is what happens when someone cares but has nowhere to put it.
This includes a lot of young people. A 22-year-old who grew up watching wildfires and reading IPCC reports isn't in denial about anything. They're terrified and they don't see a path forward. Climate anxiety is real, and it lands here. They care so much it's paralyzing.
This is a fundamentally different conversation than the first three modules. You're dealing with despair. And despair is sneaky, because it looks like the most reasonable position in the room. The person isn't being irrational. They just got stuck in a place where the enormity of the problem swallowed any sense of agency.
This one's dangerous because they might be saying what you're afraid is true. Every advocate has a 3am version of themselves that thinks exactly this. So when someone says "we're fucked," part of you wants to argue not because they're wrong, but because you need them to be wrong.
Watch for that. If you're arguing with their despair because you need to convince yourself, you're having yours. And they'll feel it.
The other temptation is to go full cheerleader. To overcorrect with optimism, rattle off solar panel statistics, talk about how much has changed. That can land as dismissive, like you're not taking them seriously. They didn't arrive at hopelessness casually. Don't treat it casually.
That's the difference. In the first version, you treated their despair as an obstacle to overcome. In the second, you saw where they are, you knew where you are, and that clarity showed you what the conversation actually is.
This is a different kind of conversation. The person you're talking to is often someone who deeply cares about climate. They've just landed on a binary: either we stop emissions or we don't. And anything that isn't "stop emissions" feels like a distraction, or worse, a permission slip for the fossil fuel industry to keep going. Al Gore has called direct air capture "nonsense" and "hilarious", and mocked the machines themselves. When someone like that is dismissing it, you can see how easily the rest of the climate world follows.
There's a real history behind that suspicion, and they're not wrong to have it. The oil industry has funded carbon capture research for decades as a way to argue against emissions cuts. So when someone hears "carbon dioxide removal," their brain says: delay tactic. The thing is, the math still requires both. Even if we stopped all emissions tomorrow, there's already too much CO2 up there. Decarbonization stops the bleeding. Removal cleans up the wound. But the person in front of you isn't making a math error, they're making a trust judgment. And their trust has been earned the hard way.
You'll also hear: "Carbon credits are fraudulent." And there's real substance behind that too, the voluntary market has had genuine scandals. The mistake isn't in their skepticism. It's in the leap from "some credits are bad" to "the whole concept is fraud." That's the same pattern as Module 2's "scientists have been wrong before, therefore science is broken." One real problem gets inflated into a wholesale dismissal. If you can see that pattern, you know what you're looking at.
If you're an advocate who's deep in the climate space, this is where your own tribal loyalties can trip you up. A lot of climate activists are skeptical of carbon dioxide removal, and if that's your world, you might feel pressure to agree. Or if you're on the removal side, you might dismiss the decarbonization-first crowd as naive.
Watch for the binary in yourself. This isn't an either/or. The IPCC says we need both. Every credible pathway to 1.5°C includes both massive emissions cuts and significant carbon dioxide removal. If you can hold that complexity, instead of collapsing into a side, you'll be more useful in the conversation than someone who's picked a team.
That's the difference. In the first version, an ally became an adversary. In the second, you found the shared concern underneath the disagreement, and turned a fight into a collaboration.
This person has come a long way. They accept the climate is changing, they accept humans are involved, they even accept the impacts are serious. But they've decided the timeline is long. Centuries. Generations. Plenty of time. Technology will catch up. We'll adapt. No need to panic, no need to rush, no need to change anything right now.
This sounds measured. Calm. The person isn't denying anything - they're just saying "relax." And in a world where the doom crowd is loud and the denial crowd is loud, "relax" can sound like the sane middle ground.
But it's not. The science is clear that this decade matters enormously. The difference between acting now and acting in 30 years is the difference between manageable adaptation and cascading failure. Every year of delay locks in more warming, more damage, more cost. The window is closing now. And "technology will solve it" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for people who haven't looked at what the technology actually requires in terms of time, investment, and scale.
What's underneath this is usually comfort. Their life is fine. The weather where they live is fine. The economy is fine. Why would they blow up something that's working? The urgency you feel is abstract to them. Nothing in their daily experience confirms what you're telling them.
This one can drive you crazy because it feels so close. They're not denying. They're not deflecting. They're just... not worried. And the gap between "not worried" and "we need to act now" can feel impossible to bridge without sounding alarmist.
Watch for the temptation to escalate. When someone is calm and you're urgent, the instinct is to get louder, more dramatic, more dire. But that plays right into their frame - you become the panicky one, and they become the reasonable one. You've just confirmed their story about themselves.
The thing to hold on to: you don't need them to feel your urgency. Stay curious about what their timeline actually looks like, where is climate already showing up in their life? That's a much more doable conversation.
That's the difference. In the first version, you wrote them off as complacent. In the second, you found the thread that could pull them from "someday" to "now" - and you know exactly where to pick it up next time.
Maybe you don't like this module. Maybe the other modules all reminded you of "other people" and this one seems out of place. Good awareness. Please keep reading.
This is the conversation you've been waiting for. The person in front of you has made it through the whole map. They accept the science, they feel the urgency, they believe action is possible and necessary. And now they're asking the hardest question of all: what do I do with everything I know?
This question comes from all kinds of people. A software engineer wondering if they should leave their job and work on climate. A parent who wants to know if their retirement fund is making things worse. A college student trying to figure out what career path actually moves the needle. A retiree who has time and money and wants to put both somewhere that matters.
What they all have in common is that they've already done the emotional work. They're past denial, past deflection, past despair. They're ready. And "ready" is rare. Most people never get here. So when someone asks you "how do we get there?", pay attention. This is the most valuable conversation you can have.
This is where you might feel the most pressure to have answers. Someone is finally asking the right question and you want to hand them the right path. But the truth is, there isn't one path. There are thousands. And the one that's right for them depends on their skills, their resources, their situation, and what they're willing to change.
The temptation is to pitch your thing, your organization, your cause, your approach. Watch for that. If you're in climate professionally, everything can start to look like a recruiting opportunity. But this person just arrived at the most open, most ready version of themselves. Meet that with curiosity, not a sales pitch. Ask what they're good at. Ask what they care about most. The best answer to "how do we get there?" is usually another question: "what are you willing to do?"
That's the difference. In the first version, you broadcasted. In the second, you connected someone's existing skills to the problem, and something might actually happen because of it.
Those are the seven questions. My vision is that we all get there, that enough people move through the map, land on question seven, and start doing the work. That we sort out how to get there. And then, as a planet, we move on to what's next.
It's a big undertaking and will eventually need a lot of people rowing in this same direction. If today that includes you, that's great. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
You might be asking whether I think it's likely we'll succeed at this. What I'll say is that it's possible. I understand that the evidence doesn't look so good — carbon dioxide levels have risen year after year. But I want us to succeed.
What's next is question eight.
Question eight: What do we do now that we've balanced the climate?
I haven't written that module yet because we haven't gotten there. When we stabilize the climate, when we've cut emissions and cleaned up what's already up there, there will be a whole new set of questions. How do we maintain a stable climate? How do we build a culture that keeps it stable? What does stewardship look like at a planetary scale? How do we govern something this big, across borders and generations? What does responsibility mean when the crisis is behind us? And maybe most importantly: how do we make sure we don't go back?
Those are question eight conversations. They're about maintenance, culture, governance, and the long work of keeping something good once you've built it. I look forward to having them.
I put this map together, and I'm on it too. My goal in life is to get us to number eight. Right now I think that means maximizing number seven, getting as many people as possible into "how do we get there?" and doing the work.
But I'm not always at question seven. Some days I wake up and I'm at three, or four, or five, or six. That's normal. The map isn't a ladder you climb once and stay at the top. It's a map, you move around it depending on what you've been reading, who you're talking to, and what you've been doing.
In my experience, a lot of people working in carbon and climate are actually at question five or six. They're building solutions but haven't fully reckoned with the timeline, or they're deep in the removal space but still fighting the "is stopping enough?" battle in their own heads. That's okay. The point of the map is to see where you are too.
One note on how to talk about this map: it's a map, so you would say someone is "at question one" just like you would say "my friend is at Town One." Rather than a personality test, like "my friend is a Type One." This isn't a personality test. Just like being at a location on a map, people visit different questions and move around. Right now, a lot of people are at question one. We want more people visiting question seven.
A friend pointed out that people might be sitting with several of these questions at once, and I think that's right. If that's the case, it's best to work on the earlier questions first.
Thank you to Leonardo DiCaprio for his speech in 2016, and to everyone who has had climate conversations with me in the last decade. From "it's all too political" to "the sun is going through a warming cycle" to "I just know we're going to succeed" to "we have plenty of time", I've had hundreds of conversations that help me see the possibility for a stable climate and thriving human civilization.
If you found this guide helpful, I'd love to hear from you. I run AirMiners, a community working on carbon dioxide removal, and I write a weekly newsletter about climate conversations, the removal space, and what I'm learning along the way. Sign up here if you want to stay in touch.