being the change

Is climate science a relatively new profession?

Well, the first climate scientist was Svante Arrhenius. He was around in the 1890s in Sweden. He realised that if we kept burning coal it would start making the planet warmer. He even made a forecast of how warm it would get, and he was surprisingly accurate.

Was this what you always wanted to be?

I wasn’t originally planning to be a climate scientist. I got my PhD in physics and was doing astrophysics, but I started hearing from climate scientists and reading papers. A few years later, I just couldn’t focus on astrophysics anymore. I decided I needed to make a switch for my own sanity.

Where are we at with climate change?

Ignorance is bliss, especially when it comes to climate breakdown. But for climate scientist and father-of-two Peter Kalmus, it was impossible to do his day job and keep his head in the ever-warming sand. So Peter decided to go on a quest, work out where his personal carbon emissions were coming from and drastically reduce them. And now he’s helping others do the same.

Let’s use the term ‘global heating’, because I like using the terminology of ‘climate breakdown’ and global heating. There are a