A Load of Bollocks? (Paperback or Softback)

For most of her life, Anika Sweetland believed she knew how the world would end. She was ten when she first read that climate change threatened the Great Barrier Reef. The warnings followed her into adolescence: rising seas, drought, famine, climate refugees, collapsing ecosystems and a future growing steadily more dangerous.

At nineteen, fear became purpose. Anika enrolled in a Climate Science degree determined to help solve what she believed was humanity’s greatest crisis. She studied the models, embraced the policies and worked in government writing energy policy. Climate change was not politics to her. It shaped where she imagined living, the career she pursued and even how she felt about bringing children into the world.

But years later, while researching the policies intended to deliver Net Zero, she began finding things that disturbed her. One question became another. Then another. Eventually she returned to the predictions that had frightened her as a child, pulled out her old university notes and began examining the foundations of the worldview she had carried for nearly three decades.

What she found forced her to confront not only climate science and policy, but her own past. A Load of Bollocks? is a provocative, funny and unexpectedly moving memoir about fear, authority and what happens when certainty begins to unravel. And when the next terrifying headline tells us the end is nigh, perhaps we should all have the courage to ask: what if it’s all a load of bollocks? Anika never expected to ask that question. This is the story of what happened when she did.

Anika Sweetland is a British-Australian climate and energy commentator, broadcaster, writer and former government energy policy adviser.

Born in England and raised in Australia, Anika attended Methodist Ladies' College in Perth, Western Australia, before going on to study Climate Studies at the University of Western Australia.

Her choice of degree was anything but accidental. Having grown up genuinely frightened by predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming, Anika entered university determined to become part of the solution. She wanted to understand climate change, help protect the planet and, in her own small way, save the world.

What she could never have anticipated was where that education would eventually lead her.

Whilst studying, Anika worked in regional energy policy at the Gascoyne Development Commission in Western Australia, where she helped produce the Gascoyne Energy Strategy and had the honour of presenting policy recommendations to the Australian government. Her professional experience gave her an increasingly practical perspective on the enormous and often uncomfortable intersection between energy, economics, development, environmental policy and people's everyday lives.

Over the years, the certainty with which Anika had once viewed climate change began to unravel. She started revisiting assumptions she had absorbed at school and university, examining predictions she remembered terrifying her as a young woman, and asking questions she had once thought were already settled.

Eventually, she found herself in an extraordinary position: advocating against the very climate alarmism she had once passionately believed.

Today, Anika is a prominent critic of Net Zero policies and an outspoken advocate against what she regards as the indoctrination of children and young adults through alarmist climate-change education. Rather than telling young people what to think about climate change, she believes they should be taught how to examine evidence, challenge assumptions and think critically for themselves.

She is a proud member of the CO2 Coalition, an organisation of scientists and professionals promoting greater public understanding of carbon dioxide and advocating for its essential and beneficial role in the natural world.

Anika has taken her arguments to international audiences. She has spoken at climate and energy conferences in Europe and the United States, including the World Prosperity Forum in Zurich and the International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, D.C. Her talks draw heavily upon the unusual perspective of someone who did not begin her journey as a climate sceptic, but as a young woman who sincerely believed she was studying climate science to help avert a planetary catastrophe.

She is also increasingly familiar to television audiences. Anika has her own weekly segment, Crazy Climate News of the Week, on Mike Graham's UK LIVE show, where she takes an irreverent look at some of the week's most extraordinary climate, environmental and energy stories. Combining her background in climate and energy policy with a refusal to take either politicians or herself too seriously, she attempts to bring something often missing from the climate debate: humour.

Her book, "A LOAD OF BOLLOCKS? The Trillion Dollar Climate Scare" tells the story of that transformation.

Part memoir, part investigation, it retraces the climate warnings that shaped Anika's childhood and young adulthood, her decision to dedicate her education and career to the issue, and the discoveries that eventually caused her to question a worldview she had once accepted wholeheartedly. It asks a provocative but deeply personal question: what happens when someone who was trained to fear climate catastrophe begins checking the predictions for herself?

Anika's approach is deliberately irreverent. Climate change is an extraordinarily serious subject, but she does not believe that means it must be discussed without humour, disagreement or curiosity. If anything, she believes the opposite.

Away from climate and energy, Anika's guilty indulgence is spirituality. Although she insists she doesn't take any of it too seriously, she is endlessly fascinated by energy medicine, tarot, astrology and Eastern philosophy and is quite happy disappearing down the occasional metaphysical rabbit hole.

It perhaps reflects the philosophy she tries to bring to the rest of her life: remain curious, question everything, don't become too certain of anything, and always try to have some fun along the way.

Anika now lives in a friendly village that looks like something out of a fairytale, nestled safely in Hampshire, England.