Getting your head around climate change can be a bit of a nightmare. It seems like such a huge and complex subject, combining science and politics with history, international relations, energy, poverty, natural disasters, eco-campaigning and the choices we make in our day-to-day lives. There are so many different sources of information and it can be hard to know what to make of it all.

The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change Video Project aims to cut through all of this confusion and give you the key information that you need to know, in a friendly, lively and jargon-free way. We’ve done our best to make these short films fun and informative and backed up by the latest science and research. On the No-Nonsense Videos website the script will be available alongside each video, with further explanations of the facts, figures and links you can follow to get more information and take action. The first of the videos is The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Science.

The second video is the No-Nonsense Guide to Tackling Climate Skeptics.

The third and fourth videos will be:

• The No-Nonsense Guide to Fixing Climate Change: The Barriers
• The No-Nonsense Guide to Fixing Climate Change: The Solutions

If you find these videos useful, please share them far and wide!

Who are we?

The core team behind this project consists of climate change writer Danny Chivers and campaigner and filmmaker Richard Roaf.

Danny is the author of the The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change and has been researching, writing and taking action on climate change for over 15 years. Richard produces videos that make complex issues accessible and fun. 

These videos are part of the No-Nonsense series from New Internationalist, an award-winning magazine and publishing house renowned for its high quality journalism on a range of world issues. This is the first set of videos to form part of the series.

Some films and textbooks claim to provide a balanced, unbiased view of the issue of climate change. This is a nice idea, but impossible. Climate change is something that affects, and is affected by, almost everything in our lives. There’s no way for anyone to communicate it without their own perspectives, beliefs and preferences creeping in.

So what we’re going to do is be honest about it: we’re going to tell you upfront where we’re coming from. These are our starting points.*

1. Climate change is a serious issue and will affect, or is already affecting, everyone on the planet.

2.  There are many other crucial issues in the world apart from climate change, such as poverty, inequality, war and oppression, or just the day-to-day struggle to get by that so many people face. It’s important that the solutions to climate change don’t make these problems worse. In fact, we should really try to find ways to tackle climate change that help with these other problems at the same time.

3. The solutions to climate change should be as fair as possible, with the people who are most responsible for the problem having to put the most time, energy and money into the solutions. The people most affected by climate change should also have a big say in how to solve it. This just seems like basic fairness.

4. Climate change isn’t just a technical issue to do with putting the wrong amount of certain gases into the air. It’s tangled up with politics, lifestyles, economics, power structures, culture and belief. This is why it’s proving so difficult to solve, and also why it’s simultaneously disastrous, frustrating, fascinating, heart-breaking, and utterly relevant to everyone in the world.

We hope that all sounds reasonable. If it doesn’t – if you think that everything’s just hunky-dory in the world, or that climate change is just a side issue that hasn’t got much to do with anything else – we urge you to watch these short films anyway. Let us try to persuade you. It’ll be fun.

*These starting points first appeared in Danny’s book, The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change.