Theresa Leisgang spent over ten years reporting on environmental and human rights issues as a journalist, travelling for magazines and researching for her book, in places where the effects of the climate crisis are already an existential threat to livelihoods. She has interviewed people from the Amazon region to the Arctic, from South Africa to eastern Brandenburg, and had many conversations with those who have not given up hope despite it all.
Soon, major media outlets began to devote editorial departments to climate reporting. When feel-good podcasts promised to counter climate news fatigue, Theresa became alert: those hopeful stories increasingly lacked a critical assessment of the catastrophic status quo.
Setting out to shed a critical lens on the world, as part of a small team affiliated with Leibniz University and Hanover University of Applied Sciences, we (co-authors Theresa and Gerriet Schwen) had the opportunity to explore the potential of no-nonsense climate communication and the effects of confronting real statistics. Can distilling the unfettered truth more effectively alert or even shock us in a way that will make clear what is at stake?
The question is not whether collapse will happen or when, but how to inspire a deeper determination to do what is important for all of us. As Eva Marlene Hausteiner, a professor of political theory, puts it: “The insight into what a dystopian future could realistically look like should trigger a political and social learning process.”
In a paper titled “Climate Endgame. Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios”, the basis for our research project, some of the world’s most renowned researchers asked: “Could human-induced climate change lead to global societal collapse or even human extinction? Currently, this is a dangerously under-researched topic.”
Perspectives on a possible ecological and also social collapse are still largely absent from the discourse in German-speaking countries, even despite a few bright minds who have long foreseen the overlapping crises we are facing today: “One thing is certain: the post-collapse society will find itself in a world that has little or nothing to do with the one we know today”, wrote German author Johannes Heimrath in 2010.
In France, an entire “collapsologie” movement is trying to imagine this new world, and there is also a lively debate in the English-speaking world. “What if we stop pretending?” asked bestselling author Jonathan Franzen in 2019, stating: “The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we must admit that we cannot prevent it.“ So why is the German-speaking debate still so stuck in the ”We can do it!” narrative?
To answer this question, we invited people from the fields of science, journalism, and activism to join us in discussions—on panels, in workshops, at conferences, and around campfires.
Why is climate discourse so irrationally optimistic?
In February 2024, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed that we had crossed the 1.5-degree global warming threshold for the first time in 12 consecutive months. There was no media outcry or public debate. And this despite the fact that, since the 2015 climate agreement, the slogan “Keep 1.5°C Alive” has been supported by a broad spectrum of actors – from business leaders in Paris to radical activists on the front lines.
Has the talk of apocalypse become so worn out that neither an “Extinction Rebellion” nor a call from the “Last Generation” can stir the population?
Seven of nine planetary boundaries have already been exceeded, according to scientists. Extreme weather, such as the recent heat dome over Europe, costs human lives and degrades quality of life. The 2021 floods in Western Germany alone caused damage amounting to over 40 billion euros. We find ourselves in the worst-case scenario modeled by climate science.
There are various reasons why the German-speaking climate discourse is nevertheless so optimistic: We have distorted basic assumptions. We have not learned how to feel. We have not learned how to fail.
Our distorted basic assumptions
In the face of escalating ecological disasters, we question the widespread assumption that only hopeful communication and stories of success can contribute to change. We have been waiting for this change for decades. Nevertheless, the conviction remains that those who do not communicate optimistically are discouraging. But this belief relies on a negative view of human nature: that extreme situations bring out the worst in people, and that the mere idea of a catastrophe could plunge society into chaos.
Historian Rebecca Solnit disagrees. In her book A Paradise Built in Hell (2010), she shares how, in the aftermath of devastation wrought by a natural disaster, people are often found to “rise to the occasion”, many doing so “with joy”. Whether after an earthquake, the terrorist attacks of 9–11, or the fall of a dictator, it is precisely through disaster, found Solnit, that a sense of community and self-empowerment can arise that would seem impossible in everyday life.
Researching climate communication is complex. Some psychological studies do show that pleasant feelings can support behavioral change. Other studies, however, suggest that people change when they understand that it is necessary.
In our conversations with leading climate scientists, it became clear to us that there is little systematic consideration of the impact of climate communication. The German Physical Society only established a working group on climate communication five years ago – more than 50 years after issuing its first warnings about the irreversible consequences of climate change at its annual conference.
When renowned scientists talk about their research on Earth’s tipping points, they never fail to add: there is light at the end of the tunnel. One person who has left their academic career behind for this reason is climate scientist Wolfgang Knorr. After 30 years of developing climate models, he is now calling on his colleagues to adopt a radical realism. What he finds particularly worrying is that even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) bases its scenarios on technologies that have not yet been invented or are not available at a scale sufficient to bring global emissions to “net zero”. The emerging field of research on “Climate Overshoot” acknowledges that we are now living in a world beyond 1.5 degrees – but equally bets on so-called mechanical trees and other magical technologies to bring us back into a safe operating zone sometime in the future.
What is needed now: Learning how to fail better
If we take a step back and look at the attempts to communicate the climate crisis—our own and those of others—then perhaps now is the time to admit that we have failed. “One point five” was not a successful campaign; we have overshot the physical limit in the Earth system.
This is not only disappointing. It also opens up new ways of looking at reality. Letting go of the illusion that everything will turn out fine after all. That we can plan the future. That things will get better again. Begging the realization that if we say goodbye not only to the 1.5 degree threshold, but also to the false hope of green growth, progress, and technology, then between which futures can we still choose? Perhaps a collapse of global supply chains will come first; perhaps the next pandemic; perhaps extreme weather events will simultaneously destroy crops in different places (researchers call this “multiple breadbasket failure”); perhaps the financial system will collapse shortly after our democracies.
We are heading towards a future fraught with perversely normalized disaster. “Climate collapse is now, but it is not ‘the apocalypse,’” writes German climate activist and social scientist Tadzio Müller in his blog FriedlicheSabotage.net. “Not acknowledging this means bullshitting ourselves,” he said. In other words, the steady demise has been going on for a long time, and the collapse will not be a spectacular Hollywood-style apocalypse. Every day, animal and plant species are dying out; 120 million people worldwide are already fleeing their homes; the price of olive oil has risen by 45 percent between 2024 and 2025 due to crop failures; and more and more medicines are not reliably available, even here in Germany.
What Müller has tried to do in vain so far is to distinguish between the terms “climate collapse” and “apocalypse” – yet every time, the same image of a single extreme event pops into people’s minds. In German, there is a lack of precise words to adequately describe our global situation. More nuanced is the English public debate on “climate breakdown,” “The Great Unraveling,” or “predicament.”
Words shape our world. A look at the history of terminology in the environmental movement shows the enormous impact that frightening images such as “forest dieback” or “nuclear winter” can have. The latter term was coined in the 1960s to paint a bleak picture of a world after nuclear war: cold, dark, dangerous. To prevent this outcome, people came together to form the anti-nuclear movement, one of the largest social movements of the post-war period.
Facing up to reality with radical honesty can be unsettling – but it can also awaken a deeper determination to do what makes sense amidst dire circumstances. Recognizing that it is no longer about victory or defeat—such as preventing the climate crisis or defending the 1.5-degree limit—gives rise to a new feeling about the world. We will exceed 1.5 degrees, but we can still steer ourselves onto a sustainable path, away from the question of “all or nothing,” toward accounting for small successes: preventing every 0.0000001 degree temperature rise, every refugee we have offered a home to in our city, and every butterfly that has been able to reproduce in the meadow in front of our house.
In the face of catastrophe, motivation no longer depends on distant prospects of success—what we do makes immediate sense because we know deep down why we protect life, why we adapt and prepare for disasters and crises. Václav Havel, pioneer of the Czechoslovak revolution in the 1970s and 80s, found the right words for this:
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, no matter how it turns out.”
