Introduction

Apart from climate scientists and their brethren, the mere mention of +1.5°C does little to strike fear, not to mention concern in the minds of most of the lay population. Could this in part be the reason for the recent rapid abandonment of decarbonization goals and overall interest in climate risk altogether, particularly against a backdrop of cost-of-living crisis and increasing geopolitical instability?

The persistent lack of urgency is understandable. Beyond the very benign sounding number itself, and until very recently – heatwaves (particularly those occurring outside summer) are often reported alongside images of beach goers, blue sky ‘glorious’ winter days. Although this narrative is abruptly giving way to reports of chaotic fights over air conditioning units in France amid the ongoing European heatwave, it remains to be seen if this memory will endear or fade akin to mask and tissue paper panic buying during COVID.

While there are persuasive reasons to ‘keep the message simple’ in climate policy by gravitating to a single average number that covers the entire world, we argue that its benefits are significantly outweighed by a gross underestimation of the current severity and imminence of climate impacts to society. For example, the recent reaction to the retirement of the most pessimistic climate scenario of Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 8.5 reveals a collective lack of understanding of the climate sensitivity relationship – i.e. that a lower concentration of carbon emissions could still result in temperature outcomes associated with RCP 8.5.

As such, this paper will first illustrate the scale of the “perception gap” created through averaging across space and time, highlight how mainstream interpretation (i.e. through climate scenarios and climate stress tests) and communication of climate risk further compounds the underestimation issue, and suggest some practical ways to overcome these challenges.

How large is this ‘perception’ gap?

Cognitive research indicates that the perception gap is significant even if we focus on the temperature variable and deliberately ignore impacts to changing precipitation patterns, winds and marine heatwaves. Namely, the risk of misinterpreting complex planetary average of ‘+1.5°C’ as a uniform, benign local increase.

However, warming is not uniform and we argue that a poor appreciation of the impact of averaging across space and time lulls the public into a false sense of security. For example, land areas warm significantly faster than oceans as oceans have a higher heat capacity and distributes heat through mixing and currents. As such, large continents like Europe and Asia have warmed at roughly double the rate of the global land and ocean. This divergence is expected to further increase through feedbacks particularly with reduced rainfall leading to drier soils, less evaporation and even more energy available to heat land and accelerate the warming rate. (see Table below)

After removing the effect of averaging across both space and time dimensions, the deviations become even more pronounced. For example, when we shrink from global/annual to a city/month level, monthly daily max. temperature anomalies have already reached up to +5.6°C and + 4.7°C for Paris and Tokyo respectively in recent history. These deviations naturally become even more glaring if we focus on the tail – where events such as the recent European heatwave produced anomalies that exceeded +10°C above historical reference means for late June 2026. For cities, or built environment – the effect of climate change can be amplified by urban heat island effect and is especially dangerous where there is high humidity (i.e. Tokyo and Hanoi) or if the heat is prolonged and there is little adaptive capacity (i.e. lack of air conditioning) which leads to heat stress and excess mortality for aged persons.

Naturally, climate impacts extend well beyond temperature outcomes into changes in rainfall, biosphere and the risk profile of natural weather disasters, but the link to these impacts are even more tenuous to the +1.5°C, which increases this perception gap.

Distorted scientific understanding widens the gap

Apart from the reduction of climate complexity into a single policy +1.5°C target, the way evidence of climate change is presented officially further encourages society to downplay the seriousness of the issue. Firstly, the use of the term ‘climate crisis’ (which is already a slight improvement on the even more benign sounding ‘climate change’), rather than ‘emissions crisis’, does not strike a strong enough connection between temperature increase and the root cause of the issue. This deflects attention to symptoms rather than addressing the root cause – akin to risks of smoking termed ‘lung crisis’, or obesity risk referred to as ‘knee-joint crisis’.

Next, while it is important to communicate climate risks in ways that resonate with the general public, mainstream media tends to over-simplify, under-play and over-exaggerate climate risks (depending on vested interests) rather than report science without fear or favour. Heat has been given a positive spin with anomalously warm days associated with beachgoers frolicking by the ocean or using language such as a ‘glorious winter day’ to characterize heatwaves that occur outside summer. In fact, even with the devastating impacts of the recent European heatwave laid bare, an op-ed featured in a major newspaper used the irrefutable evidence of clear and present climate danger to argue that Britain should ‘embrace a warmer Mediterranean lifestyle’ and an excuse to give up on Net Zero efforts altogether¹.

On the other extreme, sensationalizing climate impacts may risk alienating those who are ‘on the fence’ or open-minded readership who are genuinely interested in climate action – through the ‘crying climate wolf’ effect². For example, instead of acknowledging inherent uncertainty and complexity of climate science, predictions of imminent climate doom such as failed drought predictions in 2007 by mammalogist Tim Flannery³, dramatic increase in un-insurability⁴, as well as trillion-dollar damage bills and credit rating downgrades⁵.

Lastly, even after repeated rounds of financial climate stress tests conducted across various jurisdictions around the globe – the stubborn finding of ‘nothing to see here’ with respect to systemic climate risk impacts may lull authorities into a false sense of security, and further delay decarbonization policy. However, it is less obvious that many of these stress tests are premised upon scenarios from bodies like the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) that have emerged as a de-facto global standard in financial climate reporting. These scenarios, in turn, rely on potentially flawed damage functions within their Integrated Assessment Models (IAM) that estimate benign GDP impacts despite extreme climate change (i.e. over 4-5°C global surface average temperature warming). A key reason for this persistent view is the lack of interdisciplinary collaboration – i.e. economists and physical climate scientists conducting research in silos⁶. Worryingly, there remains limited appetite from authorities and standard setters to challenge the way climate stress tests and global scenarios are presented although a body of new research into tipping points, and interdisciplinary alternative efforts such as storyline approaches⁷ are now available.

Practical suggestions on how to overcome these challenges

As climate impacts are increasingly felt – and in many cases live streamed – around the world, one would have expected increased urgency to tackle the issue. Given the geographical breadth and severity of the recent heatwave in Europe, the continued rise in support for far-right, populist and anti-climate parties is challenging research that revealed positive ‘nudges’ in support for climate action following lived climate disaster experience⁸.

However, these latest data points reaffirm studies that show this experience pales in comparison to economic and social forces when it comes to shaping climate action such as voting preferences. This suggests that the general public views climate action and economic welfare as a ‘zero-sum’ game although this is not strictly true, as economic and social security presupposes a stable climate regime. With successive reports projecting more adverse future impacts, and attribution science making it increasingly clear how elapsed climate change has contributed to current impacts, but that we cannot rely on ‘lived experience’ to motivate sustained ground up climate action – what are practical steps to both increase the level of awareness and crucially ensure that awareness translates into action?

Firstly, language used in climate communication needs to be overhauled to ensure that risks of climate change truly resonate with the wider public beyond climate risk practitioners. For example, the Potential Energy Coalition suggests translating 1.5°C into messages such as ‘stop overheating’ and ‘Net Zero’ with ‘no pollution’. The most effective words are not necessarily the most scientifically precise – they are the ones that connect with the people you are trying to reach. To this end, the recent declaration of suffering heat days above 40°C, a term that was crowd sourced, in Japan by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) represents an effort in the right direction to spur greater awareness.

Next, while greater media coverage that explicitly links weather disasters to climate change is helpful, this needs to be accompanied by highlighting solutions (both emerging and those that are underway). Optimism in climate risk communication – which is not the same as downplaying risks of climate change – is critical as it has been repeatedly shown that fear without hope can reduce people’s sense of efficacy and leave them feeling powerless rather than motivated.

Another subtle impediment to real action is climate reporting. Climate disclosure is supposed to inform investors and motivate climate action through incentivizing capital allocation. Instead of decision-useful insights, ‘tick the box’ exercises have in part contributed to increased disillusionment with climate risk being a distraction rather than genuine issue that warrants real attention⁹. Without reform that introduces the need for transparent methodology and objective, measurable standards and an uplift of physical risk expertise across the disclosure ‘ecosystem’ (i.e. from global scenario modelers, services providers, standard setters, regulators and regulated entities), climate disclosure will continue to serve to delay rather than spur climate action.

Lastly, climate experts and scientists may not want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that gaps in science communication have been and continue to be exploited by skeptics to propagate misinformation to devastating effect. Therefore, experts must strive to make research more accessible, foster more interdisciplinary collaborations, and publish beyond technical journals. This would create a better chance for a ‘truth driven’ positive ripple effect where individuals move the needle within their own spheres of influence.

Notes

1. Heath A., We’ve lost the war against climate change. Time to scrap net zero, Telegraph, 29^th July 2026 ↩
2. Pui A. and Pitman A., Science integrity, (mis)communication and risks of crying climate wolf, UNSW Press, 2023 ↩
3. theconversation.com/climate-and-floods-flannery-is-no-expert-but-neither-are-the-experts-5709 ↩
4. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/17/australia-is-becoming-an-uninsurable-nation-there-may-only-be-one-solution ↩
5. smh.com.au/politics/federal/trillion-dollar-cost-of-climate-change-will-challenge-federal-budget-20230818-p5dxji.html ↩
6. Neal et al., Reconsidering the macroeconomic damage of severe warming, Environmental Research Letters, 2025 ↩
7. Fiedler, T et al., Storylines: A Science-Based Method for Assessing and Measuring Future Physical Climate-Related Financial Risk, Accounting and Finance, 2025 ↩
8. Ghasemi et al., A decade of weather anomalies and natural disasters and their influence on environmental beliefs and actions across Australia, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2026 ↩
9. Waqas E. et al., Climate Change News Audience Report 2025: Analysis of News Use and Attitudes in Eight Countries, Oxford Climate Journalism Network, 2025 ↩

Sources

• https://theconversation.com/climate-and-floods-flannery-is-no-expert-but-neither-are-the-experts-5709
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/17/australia-is-becoming-an-uninsurable-nation-there-may-only-be-one-solution
• https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/trillion-dollar-cost-of-climate-change-will-challenge-federal-budget-20230818-p5dxji.html
• https://www.climate.gov/news-features/features/whats-number-meaning-15-c-climate-threshold
• Fiedler, T et al., Storylines: A Science-Based Method for Assessing and Measuring Future Physical Climate-Related Financial Risk, Accounting and Finance, 2025
• Ghasemi et al., A decade of weather anomalies and natural disasters and their influence on environmental beliefs and actions across Australia, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2026
• Hornsey et al., Climate skepticism decreases when the planet gets hotter and conservative support wanes, Global Environmental Change, 2026
• Heath A., We’ve lost the war against climate change. Time to scrap net zero, Telegraph, 29^th July 2026
• Neal et al., Reconsidering the macroeconomic damage of severe warming, Environmental Research Letters, 2025
• Pui A. and Pitman A., Science integrity, (mis)communication and risks of crying climate wolf, UNSW Press, 2023
• Waqas E. et al., Climate Change News Audience Report 2025: Analysis of News Use and Attitudes in Eight Countries, Oxford Climate Journalism Network, 2025
• Wright S., Trillion-dollar cost of climate change will challenge federal budget, Sydney Morning Herald, 21^st August 2023

About the authors

Explore this topic in the Altiorem library

Six places to go next, each picked against a specific argument in the article. Items marked Tool are things you can use rather than read.

• City-scale climate hazards at 1.5°C, 2.0°C, and 3.0°C of global warmingTool
  World Resources Institute
  The article’s central claim, made usable: this tool breaks the global average down to what a named city actually experiences at each warming level, which is precisely the step Table 1 argues the public never sees.
• Climate Shift Index Global MapTool
  Climate Central
  An answer to the ‘glorious winter day’ framing. The map scores how much more likely climate change made today’s local temperature, turning an abstract average into a figure for the place the reader is standing in.
• Recalibrating climate risk: Aligning damage functions with scientific understanding
  Carbon Tracker Initiative, Aurora Trust and University of Exeter, 2026
  Takes up the authors’ charge against the damage functions inside Integrated Assessment Models, and sets out what a recalibration aligned to the physical science would involve.
• Planetary solvency – finding our balance with nature
  Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and University of Exeter, 2025
  The actuarial case that the ‘nothing to see here’ finding is an artefact of the method. Written by the profession that owns risk modelling, which makes it hard for standard setters to dismiss.
• Global tipping points
  Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, 2023
  The body of tipping-point research the article says is now available and largely unabsorbed by scenario design. Start here for what is actually established.
• Framing and language for effective climate conversations
  Altiorem, 2024
  The practical end of the article’s first suggestion: which words move people and which ones quietly lose them, for anyone who has to have these conversations outside a technical audience.

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