With apologies to Morris Albert.
Joe Duggan. A “science communicator”, writes on his blog:
What follows are the words of real scientists. Researchers that understand climate change.
Kevin Walsh
Associate Professor and Reader, School of Earth Sciences
University of Melbourne 
I wish that climate change were not real.
This seems like a strange thing for a climate scientist to say, but it’s true.
If climate change were not real, we would not have to be concerned about it. We wouldn’t have to worry about the future of our water resources, already strained by over population. We wouldn’t have to worry about sea level rise increasing the flooding of our coastal cities and of low–lying, densely–populated areas of poor countries. Above all, we wouldn’t have to worry about climate change being yet another source of conflict in an already tense world.
Life would be so much simpler if climate change didn’t exist. But as scientists, we don’t have the luxury of pretending.
Kevin Walsh
Associate Professor and Reader
School of Earth Sciences
University of Melbourne
Anthony Richardson
Climate Change Ecologist
The University of Queensland
How climate change makes me feel.
I feel a maelstrom of emotions
I am exasperated. Exasperated no one is listening.
I am frustrated. Frustrated we are not solving the problem.
I am anxious. Anxious that we start acting now.
I am perplexed. Perplexed that the urgency is not appreciated.
I am dumbfounded. Dumbfounded by our inaction.
I am distressed. Distressed we are changing our planet.
I am upset. Upset for what our inaction will mean for all life.
I am annoyed. Annoyed with the media’s portrayal of the science.
I am angry. Angry that vested interests bias the debate.
I am infuriated. Infuriated we are destroying our planet.
But most of all I am apprehensive. Apprehensive about our children’s future.
Associate Professor
Anthony J. Richardson
Climate Change Ecologist
Dr Ailie Gallant
School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment
Monash University
Dear Joe,
I feel nervous. I get worried and anxious, but also a little curious. The curiosity is a strange, paradoxical feeling that I sometimes feel guilty about. After all, this is the future of the people I love.
I get frustrated a lot; by the knowns, the unknowns, and the lack of action. I get angry at the invalid opinions that are all-pervasive in this age of indiscriminant information, where evidence seems to play second fiddle to whomever can shout the loudest. I often feel like shouting…
But would that really help? I feel like they don’t listen anyway. After all, we’ve been shouting for years.
I hate feeling helpless. I’m ashamed to say that, sometimes, my frustration leads to apathy. I hate feeling apathetic.
But sometimes I read things, or see things, from individuals, from communities like ‘1 million solar panels installed in Australian homes”, and optimism tickles.
I will keep doing my work. I will keep shouting in my own little way. I will be optimistic that we will do something about this, collectively. I live in hope that the climate changes on the graphs that I stare into every day wont be as bad as my data tells me, because we worked together to find a solution. All I can hope is that people share my optimism and convert it into Action.
Kind Regards,
Dr Ailie Gallant
School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment
Monash University.
Professor Andrew Pitman
Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science
Dear Jo,
You ask me how climate change makes me feel.
I do not have a single answer.
In equal measure, climate change makes me feel frustrates that my community cannot overcome ignorance and apathy. I feel scared that I cannot trigger action. I feel scared about what the future brings. But most of all, to be honest, I feel challenged by the science, I feel invigorated by how bright my group is and I feel very lucky that each day brings new challenges to confront and sometimes to overcome.
A.J. Pitman
Professor, Climate Science at UNSW.
Dr Sarah Perkins
Climate Scientist, Extreme Events Specialist
University of New South Wales.
My Dear Friend,
For sometime now I’ve been terribly worried. I wish I didn’t have to acknowledge it, but everything I have feared is happening. I used to think I was paranoid, but it’s true. She’s slipping away from us. She’s been showing signs of acute illness for quite a while, but no one has really done anything. Her increased erratic behaviour is something I’ve especially noticed. Certain behaviours that were only rare occurrences are starting to occur more often, and with heightened anger. I’ve tried to highlight these changes time and time again, as well as their speed of increase, but no one has paid attention.
It almost seems everyone has been ignoring me completely, and I’m not sure why. Is it easier to pretend there’s no illness, hoping it will go away? Or because they’ve never had to live without her, so the thought of death is impossible? perhaps they cannot see they’ve done this to her. We all have.
To me this is all false logic. How can you ignore the severe sickness of someone you are so intricately connected to and dependent upon. How can you let your selfishness and greed take control, and not protect and nurture those who need it most? How can anyone not feel an overwhelming sense of care and responsibility when those so dear to us are so desperately ill? How can you push all this to the back of your mind? This is something I will never understand. Perhaps I’m the odd one out, the anomaly of the human race. The one who cares enough, who has the compassion, to want to help make her better.
The thing is we can make her better!! If we work together, we can cure this terrible illness and restore her to her old self before we exploited her. But we must act quickly, we must act together. Time is ticking, and we need to act now.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Sarah Perkins
Climate Scientist, Extreme Events Specialist.
The University of New South Wales.
Emeritus Professor Tony McMichael
National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health
Australian National University, College of Medicine, Biology and Environment
Dear Joe
It’s hard to imagine that people are doing so much damage to the natural world. It’s sad when a society like ours can’t see further than its bank balance and stumbles blindly into a future when children won’t be able to enjoy the flowing rivers, mountain snow, coloured birds and bush animals. Don’t we have any responsibility for other creatures, forests and rivers? I’m rather ashamed of our behaviour.
It seems so silly to go on behaving like this – though, from hearing our politicians speak, it seems that making and consuming more and more is the point of life. Surely the dreadful heat we have suffered from in recent heatwaves, and the awful bushfires that have terrified rural communities in the past couple of years are telling us that something is going very wrong.
Scientist friends say it’s probably because we’re making the world hotter by adding ‘greenhouse gases’ into the air. So we are seriously harming the world around us and yet we understand how!
It’s really sad that some of our local children seem quite puzzled and worried by what they see on TV bout this and hearing what adults say. I hope my family and our community can try and help solve these frightening problems.
Sincerely,
Tony McMichael
Emeritus Professor, Australian National University
Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales
Knowing how much is at stake, knowing that I am one of the few people who understand the magnitude of the consequences and then realizing that most of the people around me are oblivious. Some of the people are not only oblivious, they also do not want to understand. They have made up their mind, maybe based on the opinion of someone they trust, someone in their family, or a friend, maybe based on a political conviction, but certainly not based on facts.
It makes me feel sick. Looking at my children and realizing that they won’t have the same quality of life we had. Far from it. That they will live in a world facing severe water and food shortages, a world marked by wars caused by the consequences of climate change.
It makes me feel sad. And it scares me. It scares me more than anything else. I see a group of people sitting in a boat, happily waving, taking pictures on the way, not knowing that this boat is floating right into a powerful and deadly waterfall. It is still time to pull out of the stream. We might lose some boat equipment but we might be able to save the people in the boat. But no one acts.
Time is running out.
Associate Professor Katrin Meissner
ARC Future Fellow
Professor Lesley Hughes
Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University
Founding Member of the Australian Climate Council
I became a professional biologist because I just loved animals – watching them, catching them, studying them. I was the kid whose bedroom was full of jars and boxes of things that crawled and slithered and hopped. The notion that I could actually be paid for doing this, as an adult, was truly wonderful.
But where to for our species in the future? Our biodiversity is our life support system, each species a precious support system, each species a precious, irreplaceable heritage item. We have harvested and cleared and plundered and spoiled. Every year our natural capital declines a bit more as we squander our heritage and rob our descendants.
And now we have this new threat, likely to be the biggest one of all.
Climate change is likely to become the biggest species killer ever, impoverishing our planet and our race.
We have so much to lose.
Prof. Lesley Hughes
Dr Alex Sen Gupta
Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales
How does it make me feel?
I feel frustrated. The scientific evidence is overwhelming. We know what’s going on, we know why it’s happening, we know how serious things are going to get and still after so many years, we are still doing practically nothing to stop it.I feel betrayed by our leaders who show no leadership and who place ideology above evidence, willing to say anything to peddle their agendas – leaders who are at best negligent and at worst complicit in allowing this to happen with full knowledge of likely consequences. I feel bemused. That scientists who have spent years or decades dedicated to understanding how it all works are given the same credibility as poleticians, [sic] media commentators and industry spokes people with obvious vested interests and whose only credential is their ability to read discredited blogs.I feel concerned that unmitigated our inaction will cause terrible suffering to those least able to cope with change and that within my lifetime many of the places that make this planet so special – the snows on Kilimanjaro, the Great Barrier Reef, even the ice covered Arctic will be degraded beyond recognition – our legacy to the next generation.I also feel a glimmer of hope. China and the USA are starting to move in the right direction and beginning to show some global leadership on this issue, even if Australia is backtracking again to a position of laggard and obstructionist.
Alex Sen Gupta
Senior Lecturer (Oceanography)
Climate Change Research Centre
University of New South Wales
Professor Brendan Mackey
Director Of Griffith Climate Change Response Program
I was unable to receive a hand written letter from Professor Mackey, but he kindly contributed the typed copy above.
Dear Earth,
Just a quick note to say thanks so much for the last 4 billion years or so. It’s been great! The planetary life support systems worked really well, the whole biological evolution thing was a nice surprise and meant that humans got to come into being and I got to exist!
I’m really sorry about the last couple of 100 years – we’ve really stuffed things up haven’t we! I though we climate scientist might be able to save the day but alas no one really took as seriously. Everyone wants to keep opening new coal mines and for some reason that escapes me are happy to ignore the fact that natural gas is a fossil fuel. Well, no one can say we didn’t try!
You’re probably quietly happy that “peak human” time has come and gone and it’s kind of all downhill got us now, though I guess you’re more than a bit miffed at what we’ve done to your lovely ecosystem (the forests and corals were a really nice touch by the way) and sorry again for the tigers, sharks etc.
In case you were wondering, our modeling suggests that your global biogeochemical cycles (especially the carbon one) should reach a new dynamic equilibrium in about 100,000 years or so. I guess it will be a bit of a rocky road until then but, oh well, no one said the universe was meant to be stable!
All the best and do try and maintain that “can do” attitude we love so much.
Prof Brendan G. Mackey, PhD
30 July 2014
===============================================================
Two things:
1. Logic (Science) and emotion (feelings) are polar opposites. Mixing the two is a sure recipe for logical disaster. Ref: fMRI reveals reciprocal inhibition between social and physical cognitive domains. NeuroImage, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.10.061
2. I feel like I want to hurl.
(h/t to Maurizio Morabito)
-Anthony
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The next time someone dismisses me for ‘not being a climate scientist’, I am going to whip out a box of tissues and start crying. They’ll listen to me then
Dr. Murray Q. Finklebottom:
Dear Joe,
How do I feel about climate change? As you can imagine I’m EXTREMELY worried. The public is catching on that we don’t know what we’re doing. And I’m very concerned that my funding will be cut and that I can’t complete my ground-breaking study on how fruit fly gonads are shrinking due to climate change. I wish it weren’t true. I wish the weather was pleasant everyday – just like it was in the distant past where our climate records began (1981). I wish everyone would give up their money, freedoms and reproductive rights for climate change like me. But our message is not getting through! I just don’t get it – no one reads my tweets or visits my facebook page! It’s as if they’d would rather go about their lives being happy!! HOW CAN THEY BE HAPPY WHEN THE EARTH’S CLIMATE IS RIPPING ITSELF TO SHREDS!!!
yours sincerely,
Murray
/sarc
Everyone should realize that science, like cooking, is a human activity and is therefore rarely if ever dispassionate, disinterested, entirely rational, or objective. As anyone who has run across Michael Mann would already know.
A couple of commentators have caught on to the adolescent nature of these letters. The capture of these remarks for the record is quite a coup. This is classic adolescent clique behavior. I have no idea why it is happening in a major university but clearly it is. It is embarrassing for the Australians reading this blog but I suspect if you look at universities in the U.S. you will find similar cadres of nonsense. CU Boulder comes to mind, and the recent Ohio State University paper on this blog would support that. It is a sad time.
A sign on the classroom wall of Ray B. Potter, physics teacher, Washington High School, Los Angeles, ca. 1950:
There are very few you really think
Among the thinking few.
The others don’t think at all,
They only think they do.
Unions produce some of the strangest behaviors from humans. If there were no thug component to their system there would be more research by psychologists on their processes and effects across societies. But then those are unions of psychologists too.
These all read like middle school kids writing essays on the less fortunate. Each one trying as hard as they can to sound more sorrowful then the next. Each prompted by their teachers to feel guilty about the lives they live when everyone around them is suffering. That only when the government steps and makes everything fair will the world be better.
Only a child would not realize this is training to think collectively and not look at things as individuals and question the group. This is how schools condition kids and socialist try to condition the masses to not think but only feel and respond emotionally with group action. Align everyone emotionally and you no longer have to worry about being questioned, because anyone questioning the group is clearly Amoral and heartless ans should be ridiculed.
Never saw better proof that the communication of emotions should be left to poets, not scientists.
I am over my initial disgust at reading the ridiculous drivel and now just want to laugh.
Being a positive sort of person can I suggest that we all put the word about that until the Science faculties have been properly cleaned out of their current infestation that young people be encouraged to study engineering not science. ( You actually learn the science but also actually understand what it means and even get to apply it).
These are adults? With doctorates and such? Sad.
Gosh, genuine true believers!
Science & stories: Bringing the IPCC to life
Our key recommendation is that the IPCC must use human stories as well as science. Human stories that illustrate the impacts of climate change. And the IPCC authors and key figures should also allow the public an insight into their work, motivations, fears and hopes
http://www.climateoutreach.org.uk/science-stories-bringing-the-ipcc-to-life/
Enabling the messenger: How can the IPCC get its message across to the public?
Human stories about the effects of climate change are also urgently required, the report says. This shouldn’t be the responsibility of the IPCC, it adds. Instead, people should start to use the work of the IPCC to build compelling narratives about the effects of climate change, from forced migration as a result of extreme weather events to local effects felt in daily life.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/05/enabling-the-messenger-how-can-ipcc-climate-scientists-get-their-message-across/
Should we should show empathy to these lost souls. Assure them that we can “feel their pain” ? /sarc
They fear not for us, but for their jobs…
Ball Bounces say
No, what is apparent is that they all are afraid of being seen as not part of the group by saying something different. Notice that they all take exactly the same tact. They feel ashamed for what man has done, they are all embarrassed that they have not been strong enough to make others see their wisdom. They are all willing to subjugate their selves to the cause no matter what the out come, because it is right.
This all screams THE INDIVIDUAL is evil and only as a group can we succeed and do good. A programmed response.
From the School of Messianic Myopia, Department of Climate.
One really wonders about cause and effect here – are these people genuinely worried and sad because they have rationally convinced themselves of impending doom, or does the CAGW meme simply satisfy some deeper longing for existential drama? Given the lack of conclusive scientific evidence, the second alternative seems a lot more plausible.
The great writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn summed up his take on the history wrought by another bunch of mankind’s self-anointed saviours: “A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” I’m not religious myself, but it seems to me that the world would indeed be better off if people like these ones would fill their emotional voids with religious fervour than with ambitions to save the real world from itself.
What is most dismaying about these puerile, childish, letters, is that they come from putative ‘academics’, people entrusted with the education of our young. It is obvious they have not the slightest idea that science is about evidence, not about feelings.
Granted, they were responding to the question, “Want to let the world know how climate change makes you feel?” A real scientist might have responded: “The Earth’s climate, and regional climates, are always in flux. I attempt to study and understand the processes that are involved. It is a fascinating area of study, and I feel grateful that someone is paying me to do it.”
But the underlying premise of the question is an ideological one, based on the assumption that “climate change” (formerly “global warming,” except there hasn’t been any lately) is a dire threat requiring urgent government action, and that isn’t happening fast enough to save the world from the coming apocalypse. I suppose if you believed that (and since it is an unfounded belief, with no evidence to support it), you might ‘feel’ that the foundations of your faith are under attack. That could be very disconcerting for a 12-year-old, and that apparently is where these self-labeled ‘scientists’ are, mentally.
/Mr Lynn
Michael Palmer says
They have, their religion is communism.
Looking at my children and realizing that they won’t have the same quality of life we had. Far from it. That they will live in a world facing severe water and food shortages, a world marked by wars caused by the consequences of climate change.
============================
Pray tell, where are the children suffering from severe water or food shortages in Australia? Australians have never been better fed at any time in their history.
As to wars. Visit the Australian war graves from WWI and WWII, both within the past 100 years. Nothing to do with climate change.
Do you seriously believe that we can stop famine, drought and war by stopping climate change? How? We had all three long before climate change, which suggest that if anything, a change of climate might be a good thing.
Diddums.
What event did these come from? The hand written essays make it look like the end of some weekend-long support for angst-filled scientists given the final assignment “Write from the heart what you think Gaia and humanity needs to hear.”
Then they all sang Kum Ba Yah and exchanged FaceBook friendships before flying back home.
BallBounces says:
August 21, 2014 at 6:16 am
We should accept the sincerity of their beliefs (as they should accept the sincerity of ours).
—
Or leave belief out and deal with what anyone with eyes open and brain on can see, that living existence is perpetual change and adjustment to change.
Conservation isn’t what nature’s into, have a look at a nice fresh fossil-rich Devonian limestone outcrop, and have a good look. That’s the only conservation Gaia’s prepared to put up with.
What did I say that sent my comment into moderation? Didn’t use the ‘D’ word. /Mr L
Steve Lohr says:
August 21, 2014 at 6:22 am
“A couple of commentators have caught on to the adolescent nature of these letters. The capture of these remarks for the record is quite a coup. This is classic adolescent clique behavior. I have no idea why it is happening in a major university but clearly it is.”
It’s very simple. The reputation of politicians in general is in the toilet since like forever. The reputation of journalists followed and is now below that of politicians. Now, who can still be used to sell your policies under these circumstances? Easy – scientists; our neo-pagan high priests.
What happens next is easy to see. The decline of reputation for the corrup scientist stand-ins is largely complete.
Now the only thing I wonder is who will be used next to sell policies. I think bloggers or Internet persona in general; the White House already predominantly uses anonymous youtube videos as their make believe evidence; maybe also Assange/Snowden style “leakers”. Cass Sunstein’s suggested internet troll/government sockpuppet patrol comes to mind.
With this shift from scientists to internet sockpuppets comes of course a decline of government science funding – Science as a propaganda tool is now a burnt out shell.
A poster stated above: “Climate scientists should have their emotions surgically removed.”
At least then they’d stand a chance of being a physicist or an engineer or a chemist, rather than a side act at the Byron Bay blues festival.