 Thank you for the invitation. Thank you for coming. We have a communications problem clearly because what we've heard is terrifying and yet the world seems to be very good at carrying on as usual. I'm going to speak about that communications problem right now because just as political support for climate action is growing so political resistance to climate action is also growing. I'm sharing this information for the first time today. The use of the hashtag climate scam has exploded since July of this year from never exceeding more than 3,000 tweets in any month up to June 2022. It's been used 70,000 to 100,000 times per month in the four months since. Compare that to the hashtag climate justice which has averaged about 30,000 tweets per month for the last two years and almost 100,000 unique tweets in the month of COP26 in Glasgow this time last year, what with all the world's media attention. But now climate scam is being used two and a half times for every climate justice tweet throughout the last four months. So these Twitter trends are just one indicator of a growing resistance to climate action. So here at a climate event we might ask how can people dismiss something happening before their very eyes? Today I'm offering an answer as a professor and a political advisor who specializes in strategic communications. I assess that resistance to climate action is growing partly because of the bad way climate issues have been communicated to the public by experts and politicians. Badly technical, badly elitist and now badly authoritarian. I believe that reflects a self-serving response from the establishment that's partly to blame for all that current backlash which is represented by this data on social media. So I want to be very clear how I see things. In only 200 years industrial activity has increased world temperatures by an amount equivalent to 20% of the total range ever experienced by homo sapiens since we walked on earth over 200,000, messing with weather systems already, damaging both wilderness and agriculture, let alone settlements and infrastructure and the speed that's the crucial thing the speed is unprecedented. In my 50 years on this earth our planet's been warming 170 times faster than it was cooling for the previous 7,000 years and that's a speed that ecosystems cannot cope with. Unfortunately communications about this have been badly technical. Using incomparable averages. If the public are told that the world is already warm by 1.2 degrees how bad do we expect them to feel? Intuitively people might think of daily maximum temperatures where an extra 1.2 degrees isn't a big deal. Feelings might shift a bit once realizing that that's an average for night and day summer winter and over land and sea but still there is nothing to compare that with that fractional that that small amount such as by knowing that it's an average it was an average of 13.6 degrees back in the year 1850 before rising to our current 15 seas average. So that's a big shift over a tiny period in world history but if we're stuck discussing incomparable averages we will lose to those who dismiss us as wanting to hurt their standard of living for a mere 1.5 degrees because in mass communications once you need to explain you've already lost. The rush to cash in on the climate crisis that we're now seeing in the halls of this conference is not only generating a backlash but it's also marginalizing radical critiques. They demand we stay positive that we will will be saved and saved by technology and big business. This is what I call climate brightsiding the public on reality because there is some inevitable warming ahead due to how much heat is within the oceans and how much carbon is in the atmosphere. In response some say that technologies like mechanical direct air capture of CO2 can help however their low effectiveness and high energy demands should not give us confidence. Meanwhile research debunks the argument that economic growth can be sufficiently decoupled from resources so that the world economy can keep growing without terrible consequences and both psychological research and activist testimony shows us that anticipating difficult futures is not demotivating instead believing that technology and big business will sort things out for us is demotivating. But as impacts worsen atmospheric carbon increases and the science becomes more troubling I think we're seeing a new mistake in how leaders are thinking and talking about climate. Oftentimes when leaders realize that the systems they administer are threatened they respond with draconian measures that make matters worse. For instance brutal approaches to law and order in the wake of disasters. With climate such elite panic could inspire leaders to curtail personal freedoms. Resistant populations might then regard action on climate change as synonymous with coercion and coercive power rather than collaboration and we're already hearing authoritarian statements on climate issues. Instead the future communications on this crisis must be focused on freeing us all from the systems that drive us to dump costs onto each other and nature. So let's work with the fact that most people want to do the right thing if they aren't forced by circumstance to do otherwise. So the communications mistakes that I've described result from the kinds of people that are currently dominating this agenda and it's why a bottom-up movement on climate justice is going to be central to everything on climate going forward. Thank you.