They're everywhere: in headlines, heatwaves, energy bills and never-ending arguments in the comments. But for most people, climate and energy can feel slippery. New facts and claims arrive faster than they can be processed. Hot takes crowd out credible context. And without a solid foundation, knowledge can fall away – like a tree without a trunk.
That’s the idea behind Climate Trunk. The metaphor works two ways. Like a tree trunk, it records our climate and energy story in its rings as it grows. It also works like a storage trunk, safeguarding and organising the knowledge you can carry with you and come back to.
Climate Trunk is the project I wish I’d had when I first tried to make sense of all this.
It’s a visual guide to understanding climate and energy – designed to hold the big picture together, from science and history to impacts and justice, from solutions and false solutions to net zero and individuals. Each ring of the Trunk adds coherence, helping you build a clearer picture.
The Trunk grew out of years of trying to cut through the noise – reading the science, the politics, the arguments, the spin, and realising how easily new information slips away without the right frame. The answer, in hindsight, was obvious: start with an image and build everything else around it. Or in this case, into it.
As visual literacy expert Lynell Burmark puts it:
‘Unless our words, concepts, and ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other.’
That’s why Climate Trunk leans so heavily on visuals – from metaphors to infographics – because they anchor memory much better than words alone. So, in a nutshell, the approach behind Climate Trunk is:
The Trunk won’t cover everything. It’s designed to help you understand and remember what really matters. It’s being built to help you stay grounded when that next wave of confusion rolls in. It’s also here to help you navigate the murky world of climate misinformation and those familiar deflection arguments that come up time and time again. You know them:
In a world full of noise and news, I’m building Climate Trunk to be both visual and rigorous: an evidence-based guide to this thorny topic.
The people and platforms that combine expertise with clarity: Katharine Hayhoe’s use of metaphor to meet people where they are, Richard Black’s clear-eyed communication and logic, Michael Liebreich’s hard-headed energy realism, Bryony Worthington’s no-nonsense approach to climate policy, and the climate science of Zeke Hausfather, Kate Marvel, Joeri Rogelj and Myles Allen. They’re specialists in their fields, but also teachers and unusually good at reducing confusion for non-specialists.
What about the Trunk itself? That comes from a master communicator and procrastinator, Wait But Why’s Tim Urban:
‘I’ve heard people compare knowledge of a topic to a tree. If you don’t fully get it, it’s like a tree in your head with no trunk—and without a trunk, when you learn something new about the topic—a new branch or leaf of the tree—there’s nothing for it to hang onto, so it just falls away.’
Visually, the project takes inspiration from Information is Beautiful, Doughnut Economics and xkcd.
Substantively, the Trunk draws on the scientific synthesis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the patient myth-busting of Skeptical Science, the open data and visual storytelling of Our World in Data and the comprehensive explainers produced by our friends at Carbon Brief.
And, of course, the many discussions with my team mates at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, Net Zero Tracker, Oxford Net Zero and Kiwis in Climate.
