It’s been a decade since Australian scientist and author Tim Flannery released his award-winning book The Weather Makers, which detailed the science behind climate change and its disturbing consequences. His new book, Atmosphere of Hope, focuses less on all the doom and gloom and more on the progress we’ve made as a species. It also shines a light on new innovations that in his view offer reason for cautious optimism at a time when many have given up hope.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
In Atmosphere of Hope, you talk more about solutions for climate change than the problem itself. What sparked this shift in narrative?
I had eight years of just seeing the problem get worse and worse. We had the failure (of climate talks) in Copenhagen, and I was deeply involved in that. It scared me. I couldn’t write a climate book for nearly a decade. The thing that changed it for me was being involved with the Virgin Earth Challenge from its early days. It’s a $25-million prize for a technology that has the promise of taking a gigatonne of carbon out of the atmosphere per year. We saw 11,000 applications for that prize, and it became clear to me over the last couple of years that there was the potential there to start pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere at scale. Even if you take a conservative view, by 2050 we could be pulling 40 per cent of our annual emissions out of the atmosphere. That’s pretty powerful stuff, and was a glimmer of hope for me.

Even if you take a conservative view, by 2050 we could be pulling 40 per cent of our annual emissions out of the atmosphere. That’s pretty powerful stuff, and was a glimmer of hope for me.

What else gives you hope?

I realized climate change is now a lived experience for almost everyone I speak with. Recognition of the problem is now widespread and fundamental, so the basis for action is there. Then the International Energy Agency (IEA) report came out earlier this year suggesting there’s been a decoupling of economic growth from emissions growth and that emissions had stalled in 2014. That has happened many years before I thought possible. Those together gave me the basis for a quite optimistic reading of things compared to where I was even two years ago.