If people don't trust climate science, how will we ever get them to change their ways?

British people estimate that 65% of climate scientists agree human-caused climate change is happening, according to research from King’s College London. In reality, the figure is 99.9%. Another survey found that 67% don’t trust politicians to tell the truth about climate change – 54% don’t even trust journalists!

If people don’t trust that there’s a crisis occurring, there’s little hope in tackling it.

But Dr Hannah Ritchie is a radical optimist. A senior data scientist at the University of Oxford, she knows exactly how much trouble our planet is in and also knows that we all have the power to make a tangible difference.

The past few years have seen a dramatic increase in distrust towards experts in all fields, though none more critical than science. Ritchie believes that this has grown from the overwhelming amount of information now permanently at our fingertips and a desire for simple solutions to the plethora of increasingly complex problems we face.

“Sometimes it’s actually hard quite hard to properly debunk myths in a simple way, because there’s often some grain of truth in them,” she says. “What people will pick up on about electric cars, for instance, is that manufacturing the battery takes a lot of energy and emits a lot of carbon, and that’s true, but often that’s extrapolated into this notion that that means the car as a whole is worse for the climate, which is not true.

“When you first manufacture an electric car, it does have a slightly higher carbon footprint because it does take quite a bit of energy to make the battery. But once you start driving it, that carbon debt very quickly pays off. For the average driver in the UK, you’ll have paid off that debt from manufacturing within about a year and a half.”