Emily has written an interesting post about our half-longing for apocalypse and the psychology of climate change. Evoking the possibility of disaster sometimes serves rational purposes, such as providing a way to deal with uncertainties about costs. There are still people who argue that the benefits of climate change are likely to exceed the costs, and others who argue that the cost of addressing climate change is unacceptably high. Pointing out the possibility of catastrophic runaway change is one way to respond to such positions.
That being said, there are deeper and more emotive reasons for which the destruction of our civilization as the result of climate change has psychological poignancy. At some level, there is the feeling that we deserve it – that our abuse of the rest of nature has disqualified us from continued participation in it. Thankfully, quasi-religious notions of sin and damnation generally leave a space for redemption. Particularly if we can do it in a way that doesn’t leave the world littered with nuclear waste and toxic pollutants, moving to a low-carbon society could help humanity to redeem itself in its own eyes.
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I appreciate that you are taking religious and metaphysical/psychological factors seriously. While I think it is not enough for “humanity to redeem itself in its own eyes”, because I think its pretty clear that the structure of guilt/redemption is part of the problem, not a possible solution, the fact these factors are being considered in a way other than as religious zealotry we have to get rid of, is a reassuring event in your blog.
John Oliver On Apocalypse Literature
By David Pescovitz on Book
In this JBooks.com video, The Daily Show writer John Oliver gives a quick survey of apocalypse literature, from the Old Testament’s Book of Daniel to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to Rob Kutner’s Apocalypse How.
John Oliver’s Literature Rodeo: Apocalypse Edition (Thanks, Kenneth Gordon!)
But this has always been one of Weaver’s strengths. Without ever dumbing the issue down, he keeps it as simple and understandable as he can.
He agrees the crux of his book comes down to a single alarming sentence on page 28: “People have simply no idea how serious this issue is.”
It’s so serious, he said, that unless we reach a point where we stop emitting greenhouse gases entirely, 80 per cent of the world’s species will become extinct, and human civilization as we know it will be destroyed, by the end of this century.
So how and why do we keep showing up to work every day with barely a ripple of disaffection? How can we have arrived a year or so away from a last chance to stave of cataclysm with no clue what to do and not be going nuts?
The best answer, relying on Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, is that we are going nuts, and our increasing determination to act as if nothing were out of whack is a very ordinary, very human response to the crisis arising from conflict between our beliefs and hard reality.
What is the nature of our crisis? We believe that everything is going to work out, that the ice shelves in Greenland and Antarctica will not slip off into the ocean and our shorelines will not be inundated even though all the evidence demonstrate that this is already underway.
The contradiction between our belief in deliverance and the reality of a rapid descent toward chaos creates within us the turbulent and distressing state Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Caught in a bind, we act unconsciously to ease our psychological burden in two ways: (1) by reducing the sources of conflict, and (2) by avoiding, rejecting or denigrating new information that would increase dissonance. As Festinger observed, these tendencies in individuals may reach mass acceptance, bolstering a catechism of erroneous beliefs. If everyone else thinks the same way, it is much easier to screen out contradictory information.
Dealing with climate trauma and global warming burnout
May 11th, 2009
I’d be very interested in hearing what coping mechanisms readers have developed for dealing with “climate trauma.”
The knowledge that humanity is headed pell-mell toward self-destruction is tough to deal with. I am fortunate that I get to vent blog full time on this subject, though that doesn’t free me from the frustrations of the Cassandra syndrome. I will share one of my secrets for avoiding burnout.
Whenever I get frustrated by people refusing to see what is right before their eyes, by the success of the climate science deniers in their campaign of disinformation and delay, and by the attacks on the personal integrity of the many idealistic scientists and activists who are desperately trying to help humanities save itself from itself, from Hell and High Water — I remember one thing. The deniers and delayers sleep well at night thanks to their blinkered ideology. And I will be damned if I’ll give them yet one more advantage on top of their better funding, better messaging machine, freedom from having to present factual or consistent arguments, and credulous coverage by a status-quo media. We simply can’t afford to get burned out, since the end result would be humanity getting burned up.
Guest blogger Gillian Caldwell, the campaign director of 1sky, has done all climate science activists a favor by opening up on this painful subject to my friend Lise Van Susteren, M.D. (who previously posted “Our Moral Obligation to Act“). Caldwell’s post was originally published here.
Depression May Provide Cognitive Advantages
“Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson, Jr. argue in Scientific American that although depression is considered a mental disorder, depression may in fact be a mental adaptation which provides real benefits. This is not to say that depression is not a problem. Depressed people often have trouble performing everyday activities, they can’t concentrate on their work, they tend to socially isolate themselves, they are lethargic, and they often lose the ability to take pleasure from such activities such as eating and sex. So what could be so useful about depression? “Depressed people often think intensely about their problems,” write the authors. “These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.” Various studies have found that people in depressed mood states are better at solving social dilemmas and there is evidence that people who get more depressed while they are working on complex problems in an intelligence test tend to score higher on the test (PDF). “When one considers all the evidence, depression seems less like a disorder where the brain is operating in a haphazard way, or malfunctioning. Instead, depression seems more like the vertebrate eye–an intricate, highly organized piece of machinery that performs a specific function.”"
Emily’s post, mentioned above, got deleted when she wiped her blog. So as to make my post somewhat sensical, I’ve reincarnated it here:
A Different Perspective: We Won’t Explode.
from eponymous horn by blackhats
Okay, so nobody wants to think about climate change. No more than anyone wants to think about war, or disease, or homework. I can dig that. I spend most of my life avoiding thinking of all those things.
But, *ahem* bear with me as I intro this.
You go through statistics on the sorts of extinctions that are expected to occur, the kind of flooding that is underway with rising oceans – threatening water supplies for tens of millions of people, the endangerment of our food supplies, (blah blah blah) and people’s eyes either glaze over, or just go dim with a grim sense of apocalypse.
Well, that sort of apocalyptic depression is starting to seem less and less sensical.
See I argue that we don’t want things to be handled. We WISH it will be the setting of the sun on mankind. We wish that one day 10 years from now the planet will be devoid of life, that our friends, family, and children will have exploded into flame and were immediately immolated in some sort of mystical, poorly understood end-of-world affair. And, we never had a chance.
That is what our Christianized roots dictate is ‘right’. That Jesus is getting ready to come down 20 years from now and say ‘Excuse me ladies and gentlemen, there has been FAR TOO MUCH of this pre-marital fucking, and sodomy. Oh, and that Hiroshima business doesn’t sit well with the boss. I’m going to let loose all hell. Quite literally. Catch some of you guys later.” *shooty finger to wide-eyed audience as bodies rise from graves and Bosch’s Garden of Delights comes to a brutal end in the last panel of the triptych.*
And, that’s what we imagine, right? That, if we believe in it, climate change means it’s ‘over’ for us. (I say ‘if we believe it’ because most of us still don’t, even if we passively accept the science.)
Well, I hate to tell you this: but as I understand it we’ve got years and years and years and years of great and challenging life yet to experience. Perhaps hundreds and hundreds. But not life as we know it. Not the type of life that we have been living now.
We are probably the most fortunate and unfortunate generation to exist yet. We have been living absurdly well. Our Great-Great grandfathers would be shocked to see how we can spend most nights in our twenties passively high out of our minds, cheerily escorting virtual prostitutes in our virtual cars in the visual delights of Grand Theft Auto. The fact that we can turn on hot water any time of day or night is not only taken for granted, it is considered an absolute necessity. If you have any disease, any ailment, you can be escorted magically in a vehicle 60 KM/H to hygienic, well-supplied, professional and relatively cheap treatment.
At least in the microcosm of Canada, we are living lives that a few centuries previous would be considered absolutely impossible, hedonistic, sinful, desirable, and absolutely luxurious.
And what we are really saying when we say ‘It’s hopeless’ is ‘I really really.. really like driving.’, ‘I am SO into Barbados.’, ‘Watching television is very enjoyable.’ And finally ‘I just cannot say no to it.’
(I’m currently telling myself ‘I cannot say no to writing on my lap-top because oh God I love it.’)
And, you know, if we were just going to all spontaneously explode after the 2012 (fingers crossed), I’d say ‘Fuck my degree. Barbados, baby.’
Sadly, I think we’re going to survive. I think that no matter how grim we try to be, how many times we say “The weather is getting hotter this summer.” “Climate change.” “Yep.” *Cue worried look* “Anyways..” We’re not all dead in the next twenty years.
Not all of us.
Human beings are hearty, resourceful, intelligent and survivalists. So yes, humanity won’t see it’s dying age within our life-time, I predict. (Speaking like this makes me feel like Winston Churchill.) But, what it will see is some great changes.
And, I think the mistake is to see ourselves as passive actors in these changes. Part of the problem is how we refer to the problem. Climate Change. Global Warming. It’s not like War, or Homework. We don’t see ourselves as active parts of the equation. The climate is something external to us. We are mere pawns to the gods of wind and humidity, of sunshine and rain.
Again. We wish it was God finally pulling the curtain. What can we, meaningless little creatures milling upon the surface of the great Earth do to control such things? Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we are fucking strong creatures. We are so strong, in fact, that we have the ability to push and shove machines that affect the global climate of all things. That is some feat. We are powerful. We’ve proved ourselves Atlases of a sort. But now that we’ve dropped the Earth and it’s rolling steadily towards a big goopy dirty-looking future, what now? It’s rolling. It’s ungraspable. It’s the weather. We can’t change that.
Unfortunately it is not a sunburn in Ethiopia that will kill us, nor the vengeful ghost of Arctic past. The problem is very tangible, and is to some extent, controllable in many ways. Governments are recognizing that we need to cap our carbon emissions to avoid runaway climate change, and if they can get a handle on it, we could see the rationing of carbon credits.
So that means each government would be part of a global initiative to reduce the total output of carbon emissions by taxing electricity and energy. You could only use X Kilowatts of energy a month, and X is proportionate to the amount of carbon credits distributed for that month. You would be buying the warmth of your family with carbon credits. The less carbon emissions we output now will almost certainly mean the more household heating, more food distribution, more life, for the next 100 or so years.
For me, this doesn’t seem discouraging. It seems natural. Three hundred years ago, if your family had a farm they would not sell it for three months of high living. They would think, “This family farm has to sustain my family and generations further down the road until the end of time. It is all I have to offer them.”
Somewhere along the line, we decided to sell the farm, and buy the luxury condominium that depreciates in value over time.
I want my family and my family’s family (even if we exclude the rest of the world) to be able to live life in a manner that is somewhat secure. I think it would be alien to think otherwise.
So the problem of ‘Climate Change’ is not so much a problem of ‘Climate Change’, but it’s a problem of ‘Your Children’s Lives’, it’s a problem of ‘Your Next Forty Years’, it’s a problem of ‘eating’.
Just a different way of thinking about it, I suppose. I just wouldn’t count on exploding.
I wonder how much of a psychological connection there is between concern about climate change today and the intense concern about nuclear war during the Cold War.
Both situations raise the prospect that the world is indeed doomed, and that everything we see around us could be catastrophically eliminated as the consequence of human choices.
Living with the realistic possibility that this could occur is probably something new for humans, and probably something that affects our psychology in society in important ways.
Has there ever been a time like this – when most experts think we are seriously flirting with a human apocalypse? Maybe with nukes during the Cold War.
Overcoming climate despair: We are the U-turn generation
This week, federal Environment Commissioner Scott Vaughan released a disheartening report, slamming the Harper government for having no plan to meet is own 2020 greenhouse gas emission reduction targets (targets that are already completely inadequate). It’s not surprising news, but adds to the feelings of desperation harbored by many.
Those of us concerned about climate change, and anxious to mobilize public support for bold action, walk a difficult line. We have to be respectful of the psychology of this time, in which the public understandably wrestles with feelings of despair and searches for hope, even as many refuse to accept what the science is telling us. Facing the realities of climate change is scary for many, and fear-based messages alone can be paralyzing. The answer is not to gloss over the seriousness of the situation, however. Rather, the answer is to engage in what our communications director Shannon Daub calls “responsible truth-telling”. (For an excellent discussion of the balance between fear and hope in climate communication, see David Roberts’ excellent essay here.)
Understanding people’s need for hope is why our Climate Justice Project has sought to communicate that policy and technological solutions are plentiful and at hand. We have also endeavored to communicate that the task before us can be accomplished in stages.
In engagements with young people in particular, I like to introduce the notion that, “We are the U-turn Generation.” The concept is this: all of us who have the courage to look the science of global warming full-on wrestle with despair. A clear understanding of what the scientific studies are telling us is that wealthy industrialized societies must be carbon-zero by 2050. Even then, we will still face the challenge of pulling accumulated GHGs out of the atmosphere, in order to get global CO2 parts per million (PPM) down to 350, if devastating ecological and social upheaval and harm is to be avoided. We are forced to live with the uncertainty of whether this Herculean global task can be accomplished. But for now, the task of this generation is the U-turn – to change the direction of the path we are on – to see global emissions slow, and over the next 30-40 years, drop to zero.
There had been warnings. In 2009, the New York City Panel on Climate Change issued a prophetic report. “In the coming decades, our coastal city will most likely face more rapidly rising sea levels and warmer temperatures, as well as potentially more droughts and floods, which will all have impacts on New York City’s critical infrastructure,” said William Solecki, a geographer at Hunter College and a member of the panel. But what good are warnings? Intelligence agents received advance word that terrorists were hoping to hijack commercial jets. Who listened? (Not George W. Bush.) If we can’t imagine our own deaths, as Freud insisted, how can we be expected to imagine the death of a city?
History is a series of random events organized in a seemingly sensible order. We experience it as chronology, with ourselves as the end point — not the end point, but as the culmination of events that leads to the very moment in which we happen to live. “Historical events might be unique, and given pattern by an end,” the critic Frank Kermode proposed in “The Sense of an Ending,” his classic work on literary narrative, “yet there are perpetuities which defy both the uniqueness and the end.” What he’s saying (I think) is that there is no pattern. Flux is all.
Looking down Central Park West, I’m thrilled by the necklace of green-and-red traffic lights extending toward Columbus Circle and the glittering tower of One57, that vertical paradise for billionaires. And as I walk past the splashing fountain in front of the museum’s south entrance on West 77th Street, I recall a sentence from Edward Gibbon’s ode to evanescence, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” in which “the learned Poggius” gazes down at the remains of the city from the Capitoline hill: “The public and private edifices, that were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune.”
This is our fate. All the more reason to appreciate what we have while we have it.
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