I hear people talk about climate anxiety... some might say it’s alarmist but actually it’s just the reality
GOOD MORNING BRITAIN METEOROLOGIST LAURA TOBIN TELLS RHONA MERCER HOW WRITING HER NEW BOOK ABOUT SMALL WAYS TO SAVE THE PLANET GAVE HER SLEEPLESS NIGHTS
LAURA TOBIN is a woman after our own hearts. While the 40-year-old presenter may be super professional, fiercely intelligent and groomed to within an inch of her life on ITV’S Good Morning Britain, the reality of her day-to-day life is just like any other mum trying to perfect her juggling skills.
When we catch up to chat about her new book, Everyday Ways To Save Our Planet, we quickly see her four-year-old daughter Charlotte appear on camera, complete with spots all over her face and chewing on a biscuit.
“We have a chicken pox child,” Laura quickly explains.
“So the plan was that Charlotte should be downstairs with my husband but he’s hosting a work conference from the living room,” she tells us.
Anyone who has seen Laura in action on GMB will know that she’s more than just a weather presenter.
She’s passionate about all things climate change and last year she flew to Svalbard in the Arctic to report on the impact it is having on sea ice and the glaciers.
One person she’s keen on educating is her beloved Charlotte, who was born three months prematurely in 2017. Laura has dedicated her book to her daughter and written a moving letter to apologise for the state of the world and to promise to fight to make it better.
Here, Laura tells us how Charlotte is a chip off the old block, why her husband, Dean Brown, is not always a fan of her sustainable switches, and that she’s happy to be that “annoying” friend…
You get a sense in the book that your daughter has already learned a lot from you about climate change…
[Laura turns to Charlotte] You take in all of the facts about plastic, don’t you? It doesn’t go in the bin, does it? It goes in the recycling.
If I go to put stuff in the bin she’ll go, “Mummy, no!” She knows if it can’t be recycled it’ll go into a hole in the ground [landfill].
We had to buy some plastic last year to cover our allotment and when we were in Wilkinson’s she said, “Mummy, why are you buying plastic? It ruins our planet.”
I explained that we needed this plastic but I could see the person next to me in the shop thinking, “How are you going to get out of that one?!”
Have you overhauled your lifestyle since writing the book?
Right at the very beginning, I was making lots of changes and my husband would be like, “What change are we making today?! Oh my goodness!” Some things he was on board with, other things he wasn’t.
It did become really overwhelming and it did make me quite stressed.
What did Dean find difficult to get on board with?
I don’t eat red meat but he likes a steak night and I tried to convince him to make steak night a fish or salmon night. But every now and then he’d be like, “I just want steak, and I’m not going to have you telling me that I can’t have steak.” But I wasn’t saying he couldn’t have it ever, just every three months instead of every three weeks.
Are you now one of those people who annoy their friends by telling them where they’re going wrong?
I was at my best friend’s house the other day and she threw her precooked chicken packaging, along with the plastic tray, into her recycling.
And then I looked through her bin and loads of things were in the wrong places and she had lots of plastics that can’t be recycled in there.
She also had food waste in her bin even though she has a compost bin.
So I was taking that out and putting it in the right bin.
How do you strike the balance when you’re talking to Charlotte about climate change to ensure she doesn’t feel anxious?
I definitely hear people talk about climate anxiety.
Some people might say it’s really alarmist when I’m talking about it, but actually it’s just the reality. I don’t want her to be alarmed.
I don’t know if I’m telling her too much. We walk most places but if we get in the car, she’ll say, “Mummy we can’t go in the car, it makes smoke!”
You had a bit of a backlash about your trip to Svalbard for GMB because you flew there…
My report from there had become the lead story on the day it ran. I had people coming up to me for months saying they’d watched it and that they had no idea of the impact we were having. And people were telling me all the changes they’d made. So the footprint we’d left on earth after flying was outweighed by the positive impact of the changes people made in their lives as a result of the show.
When you were researching this book did it give you sleepless nights?
Yeah, it does keep me awake at night. When I started doing the weather, I just fell in love – I loved science and I loved telling people about the weather forecast.
But over the years, there’s been more frequent and severe weather to report.
It used to be really rare. And now it’s happening more and more and closer to home. Records that we thought weren’t going to be broken for 50 to 100 years are being broken now and that’s what’s really scary.
I try to compartmentalise it as you still have to live your life.
Are your co-presenters scared you might catch one of them with a single-use plastic bottle?!
I go through the bins in the green room at work!
We have a new green room guy called Harry and I open the bin and say things like, “Harry, there is a milk bottle in here! “There are tea bags in here!”
In your book you refer to Charlotte as the greatest wonder of the world...
Her tenacity and strength from being a tiny baby in that incubator to being where she is now – it literally is a miracle. We’re so proud of where she is.
Will you push her to be a scientist and follow in your footsteps?
She says she wants to be a vet. I mean, I would love her to be a scientist but I’m not sure how well that’s going.
If I can push her towards science and learning, then I will. I’m that mum! And I’m not sorry about that.
She doesn’t love learning as much as I’d like her to but she’s only four!
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