By Christine Ottery

Climate science has shown in the past six months that – and sorry if this is a climate change cliché – things are worse than we thought. According to the most up-to-date science, Clive Hamilton, author of Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change says that we are likely to see warming of 4 degrees by 2070 or 2080. Despite this, some recent climate change studies have not made a much of a splash, obfuscated in a fug of Climategate. Hamilton thinks there has been a campaign against climate scientists. You can read more about this in an extract of his book here.

Hamilton also examines the yawning gap between the public perception of climate change and the science. Why do people’s beliefs, and therefore actions, stray from the facts? At a talk at the RSA, Hamilton states that people fall into three groups: those that don’t accept manmade climate change, including denialists; those with maladaptive strategies, who accept the facts but can act as if they don’t exist; or people who are adaptive and behave in line with reality. Hamilton says most of us are maladaptive, so there are real question marks over how we are going to face the challenges of climate change.

I caught up with Hamilton after the debate to continue the discussion of how to get people to act on climate change.

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