Put the whole picture on the table and trust people with it

Nick Oldridge came to climate campaigning from manufacturing, marketing and insurance. He is a cofounder of Climate Science Breakthrough, which pairs climate scientists with comedians, and he set up the National Emergency Briefing with his brother Simon.

In November 2025, they hired Westminster Central Hall, seated close to 1,300 people and put nine experts on stage to brief MPs and national leaders on the climate and nature crisis. The film made from that evening has passed a thousand community screenings across the UK.

Tom Clark speaks with him about assembling an event of that scale without an organisation behind it, and about where fear belongs in climate communication after years of correcting for despair.

In this episode:

• Why the briefing was built to look like government, from the venue to the suits
• How inviting 1,300 people became possible once supporters were deputised as inviters
• Why the briefing covered everything at once, from national security and food to health and economics
• Why fear on its own isolates people, and what changes when outrage is added to it

Nick is blunt about the trade off underneath this. The turn towards positivity was a fair correction to doom, but he thinks it cost climate its salience and left people assuming the problem is handled. Research with the University of Bath suggests the alternative holds up: most leave the screenings better informed and more motivated to act, and 93% say the UK public is not being told the full story.

Recommended culture: The Language of Climate Politics by Genevieve Guenther.

Follow Nick at: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/nick-oldridge-b7a36421/

Additional Notes:

• National Emergency Briefing, including how to host a screening: https://www.nebriefing.org/
• Climate Science Breakthrough https://www.climatesciencebreakthrough.com/
• Zero Hour, the Climate and Nature Bill campaign https://www.zerohour.uk/
• The Language of Climate Politics, Genevieve Guenther https://genevieveguenther.com/books/
• Civic Square, Birmingham https://civicsquare.cc/
• Kris De Meyer https://www.krisdemeyer.com/

Released: 30/9/2026

Run Time: 56 minutes

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Can climate communicators learn to collaborate?

Ali Wines talks to our host Tom Clark about building the Climate Communicators Alliance for closer professional collaboration and why strategy - not virality - should be how we measure our work.

Ali’s varied career which has seen her shift from law to communications via management consultancy. She founded the Alliance in 2024 after noticing that talented people working in climate and nature comms were all independently reinventing the same wheel. Meanwhile those who would mislead and confuse around the realities and urgency of climate working like a cartel: pooling their money, data and messaging. She’s asking if we can do things differently and learn from past mistakes and each other.

Listen and hear Ali share her learning on:

• Why the competition for funding keeps our sector siloed

• Building a community from a standing start

• Measuring comms against climate impact not Insta analytics
• Selling the sizzle.

It’s a candid account of what it takes to organise a profession alongside practical advice on audience empathy, evidence-based practice and how we can keep our human connection in work that can take its toll.

Recommended book: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

Follow Ali at: LinkedIn

Additional Notes:

• Climate Communications Alliance - https://www.climatecommsalliance.org/
• Uncommon Ground - https://www.we-are-uncommon.com/
• Protect Our Winters Canada - https://protectourwinters.ca/
• Climate Action Network Canada (CAN-Rac) - https://climateactionnetwork.ca/
• Sell the Sizzle, Futerra - https://www.wearefuterra.com/thinks/sell-the-sizzle
• Less is More by Jason Hickel - https://jasonhickel.org/
• Indigenous Leadership Initiative - https://www.ilinationhood.ca/
• The Narwhal - https://thenarwhal.ca/
• The Guardian, climate crisis - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-crisis

Released: 23 September 2026
Run Time: 50 minutes

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Communication is the solution, not the add on

Bernadette is a meteorologist who forecast the weather on television in the US before joining Climate Central, where she worked alongside Ed Maibach. This year, she founded the Talking Climate Collaborative with Katharine Hayhoe.

In 2011, just 54% of TV meteorologists in the United States were convinced the climate was changing. That was lower than public opinion at the time. By 2017, the figure had reached 95%. Bernadette Woods helped make that shift happen, and in this episode she explains how.

Tom Clark speaks with her about the practical mechanics of changing a whole profession's mind, and about why communication is still treated as something bolted onto climate work rather than as the work itself.

In this episode:

• Education, content and network building: the framework that reached broadcast meteorologists
• Why news management turned out to be the barrier
• Four rules for anyone who wants to talk about climate and gets stuck: know the audience, meet people where they are, simplify, make it personal
• Why the biggest piece of climate misinformation in the world is the belief that people do not care.

What comes through is how ordinary the method was. Bernadette's argument is that the approach is repeatable anywhere people already trust each other, and that the point of building a hub for climate communication now is to stop everyone learning the same lessons separately.

Recommended culture: The Lorax, and the word unless.

Follow Bernadette at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernadette-woods-placky-ab2497146/

Additional Notes:

• Talking Climate Collaborative https://talkingclimate.com/
• Landscape assessment https://talkingclimate.com/landscape-assessment/
• Climate Matters at Climate Central https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters
• Yale Climate Opinion Maps https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us/
• The 89 Percent Project, Covering Climate Now https://coveringclimatenow.org/projects/the-89-percent-project/
• This Is Planet Ed, Laura Schifter https://www.thisisplaneted.org/
• Ed Maibach on Communicating Earth, episode 3 https://climateacceptancestudios.com/podcast_ep003

Released: 16/9/2026

Run Time: 59 minutes

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube