Psychological Problems faced by disappointed alarmists
Story submitted by Eric Worrall
The Sydney Morning Herald has published an article describing the psychological problems alarmists are experiencing, in the wake of their Copenhagen 2009 disappointment.
Ask most alarmists and they will insist they are winning the debate – that the world is about to embrace green orthodoxy, that carbon trading schemes are rising, that “deniers” are more marginalised than ever before.
The article in the SMH tells a very different story – rising despair, despondency, disengagement, and in some cases delusional behaviour, in the wake of serial climate disappointments.
According to environmental scientist Nicole Thornton;
““It’s strange. Sometimes you just don’t feel you’re making headway in the time you’ve got, before it’s too late for the planet,” Thornton says. “All these little things weigh you down, and then the big stuff breaks you.”
The article goes on to describe more serious cases – for example, “Six years ago, a dehydrated 17-year-old boy was brought into the Royal Children’s Hospital, refusing to drink water. He believed having a drink would somehow contribute to the global shortage of potable water, and became the first diagnosed case of “climate change delusion”.
Personally I’ve always wondered if their is a correspondence between promotion of green ideas, and poor life choices made by far too many of our children – if you tell a child they have no future, that the world is about to be destroyed, that its all their parent’s fault, and that there is nothing they can do about it, don’t expect them to be enthusiastic about doing their homework.
However there is an even darker side to green despair. A while ago, Osama Bin Laden attempted to recruit frustrated environmentalists into his global Jihad – http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/29/strange-but-true-bin-laden-on-global-warming/
Bin Laden ultimately failed in his effort to recruit frustrated greens to his campaign of mass murder, but if we don’t find a way to pull back from this green brink of societal self hatred, next time we might not be so lucky.
h/t WUWT reader “berniel” for the SMH article
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The problem with the green delusion is that it is wrong.
There is no need to link it to international terrorism. That is mere guilt by association.
There is no need to link it to extreme depressives who would have suffered anyway, sadly.
What is interesting here is that Aussie psychologists have jumped on the Green Bandwagon.
It ain’t just Lew.
Let’s slip down the slippery slope into religion for just a moment, and attempt an analogy. I’ll use Christianity, because that’s easy and won’t result in calls for my head.
The problem with the Christ delusion is that it is wrong.
There is no need to link it to international missionaries. That is mere guilt by association.
There is no need to link it to extreme fundamentalists who would have persecuted anyway, sadly.
What is interesting here is that anonymous bloggers have jumped on the apologist bandwagon.
¿Comprende?
Did I miss the link to the article? If so, here it is:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-climate-of-despair-20140813-102r1w.html
The First? I would say it is an epidemic now. Thankfully it seems to be subsiding a bit.
The pause that depresses.
When:
1. you have a dogma that is the meaning of your life and that you try to force the facts to adhere to, and
2. the facts simply remain recalcitrant and non-compliant, and
3. you can’t get the layman to agree with your dogma,
…then you get very depressed.
“and became the first diagnosed case of climate change delusion”. I think this affliction is drastically under diagnosed. I would consider nearly all Alarmists to be climate change delusional.
The Green Delusion “is consistent with” [TM-Climate Science] the religious faith and devotion of its practitioners.
This is standard “World is Coming to an END” moonbattery when reality undermines the basis of the faith.
It’s not pretty to watch, but it will be entertaining
It’s all about classic religion-based fear marketing. People give $$ because of the fear of going to hell. Therefore, the religion markets hell. A religion based on “don’t worry, all is fine” would be broke.
I find it utterly amazing that hard core alarmists will not accept data and science that show that apocalypse is not nigh, but would rather cling to their religion of catastrophe. Illogical, but such are the vagaries of faith.
“But the reality was a massive, epic failure of political will. It broke me,” she says. “The trigger point was actually watching grown men cry. They were senior diplomats from small islands, begging larger countries to take action so that their nations would not drown with the rising seas.”
No doubt while encouraging investment in sea-front property…
“if you tell a child they have no future, that the world is about to be destroyed, that its all their parent’s fault, and that there is nothing they can do about it, don’t expect them to be enthusiastic about doing their homework.” – Good point! All this negativity and alarmism breeds fear into our children. But that is their goal, is it not – to garner buy-in on all-things ‘green’. Fear works.
“I lost hope that we were able to save ourselves from self-destruction”
“I feel like I…can…have an impact in the world.”
It’s not science. It’s a tool for changing the world, self-aggrandizement. It’s a narcissistic fetish. If the evidence for alarmism were good, it might be otherwise, but it is not reasonable to believe that the evidence is good so we may resort to a psychological explanation for the despair rather than a rational one.
The closest phenomenon I can think of occurred during the 19th century, when religious doomsayers had convinced a fairly substantial portion of the population that doom was about to arrive, and actually gave a time and place. So many believers went there and waited. And nothing happened. But many still continued to believe – they just altered the time of doom to a rather vague indefinite future point in time. They chose to alter that portion of their belief that was
easiest to assimulate – the time and place of the doom, rather than the fact of its coming.
Hummmmm,,,,, reminiscent of the “What do you mean there is no Santa Clause” syndrome……
Just sayin,,,,,
SMH, Sidney Morning Herald and also an acronym for ‘shake my head’ or ‘shaking my head.’ Usually used when someone finds something so stupid, no words can do it justice. Very apropos acronym.
Ralph Kramden says:
August 15, 2014 at 7:30 am
““and became the first diagnosed case of climate change delusion”. I think this affliction is drastically under diagnosed. I would consider nearly all Alarmists to be climate change delusional.”
Transition Town Bielefeld, an ICLEI/Agenda21 organisation, has self-help groups for their depressed members.
http://notrickszone.com/2013/10/31/green-psychologists-confirm-climate-alarmists-are-making-themselves-mentally-sick-doomer-depression/
I checked…..nope, I don’t have one single little bitty bit of sympathy
“It’s strange. Sometimes you just don’t feel you’re making headway in the time you’ve got, before it’s too late for the planet,” Thornton says. “All these little things weigh you down, and then the big stuff breaks you.”
I don’t know whether to laugh or feel sorry for this person. Must be crushing indeed, laboring under the delusion that you’re personally responsible for the fate of the planet. I recommend a good psychiatrist.
Stop scaring children. It’s criminal and hugely counter-productive. My kids (who are now in their mid 20s) first had their teachers winding them up about “the rainforest” and then later AGW. The teachers think that they’re developing “global citizens” who will go on to change the world for the better, when in reality most of the kids just adopt a nihilistic attitude that the world is screwed, there’s nothing to be done and they might as well enjoy it while it lasts. It took work on my part to disavow my kids of that, but after a few generations… We need optimistic problem solvers in the generations that follow, not angry cynics who blame prior generations for handing them a world without solutions.
Just how edo you think the followers of Bill McKibben will react when they discover he has been intentionally lying to them the whole time? For Bill its about Bill, it is not environmentalism, not climate change, not science, but Bill just wants a cause to fill his empty life. Think about it, Bill has never produced anything of value to improve anyones life but his own, all his books are about him and his causes, nothing more. It is sad that this self deluded man child who is all about self guilt, (white privledge garbage and social justice) is dragging the wholly misinformed and uneducated into his personnel hell hole. Bill has been on the tit too long and it’s time we all did what we could to provide him an intervention and expose him for the fraud he is, maybe he could get a greeter job at Walmart. A productive application of all his talent and knowledge, he can help the elderly to shop all while asking for forgivness for his life of privledge and for not being a minority.
If UBL had been serious about destroying Western Civ he would have been better off joining the Sierra Club.
You have to be free from vested interests in order to be objective. You can’t be delivering a product for your boss to sell. You can’t be feeding your own ego or riding some pie-in-the sky gravy train. You have to be able to recognize when you’ve been fooled.
As a result of this “Climate Camps” might mean something quite different in a decade. Think “Alcoholics Anonymous”….
How long before a Pied Piper arrives on the scene and convinces the flock that Guyana is a nice place to get away from it all?
So, they are all depressed that we are not doing enough to stop the coming thermageden. Do you think, when the world fails to end in the next 20 years as they expect, will that make them less depresed or more?
Thornton: ”That’s when I lost hope that we would survive as a species.”
Drama Queen Alert! Oh come on. There’s no plausible scenario where a little climate change or even a lot of climate change kills enough of the population to take out the species. Yes, eventually something is going to completely wipe life off of the entire planet but it’s not AGW and its more than likely billions of years from now when our species and those we decide to save and those that manage to stow away with us will hopefully be spread among several planets if not several million.
Worst case scenario for CAGW if all their worst fears were true would be a world like that of about 56 million years ago which life did just fine in and I’m sure humans would be able to cope with if not flourish.
Might explain the SkS bunch. Don’t they have some psychologist who should see all of this?