More depressed scientists

From the “weepy Bill McKibben” department.

sandwich board climate earthClimate alarmists were out rattling their doomsday sandwich boards again, repeating their absurd claim that a few degrees of warming, even if it occurs, may wipe out the human race.

According to the Washington Post;

What it’s like when your job is to predict the end of humanity

As recently as 2009, Camille Parmesan had a career that most scientists can only dream of.

That year, the University of Texas professor was named one of Atlantic Monthly’s 27 “Brave Thinkers” for her efforts to save species whose habitats are threatened by climate change.

The distinction — which placed Parmesan on a list alongside Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama — arrived two years after she shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for serving as a lead author of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Camille Parmesan. (Plymouth University) Camille Parmesan. (Plymouth University)

But beneath the acclaim, Parmesan recalls, her work left her “professionally depressed” and panicked — so much so that she eventually abandoned her life in the United States for a new one on the other side of the Atlantic, according to the environmental news website Grist.

“To be honest, I panicked 15 years ago — that was when the first studies came out showing that Arctic tundras were shifting from being a net sink to being a net source of CO2,” she told Esquire’s John H. Richardson for a recent piece about the emotional toll of climate science. “That along with the fact this butterfly I was studying shifted its entire range across half a continent — I said this is big, this is big. Everything since then has just confirmed it.”

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/07/14/what-its-like-when-your-job-is-to-predict-the-end-of-humanity/

If you make it past Parmesan’s sharing of her angst, without losing your lunch, and through the middle of the article, the final obstacle to your digestive equilibrium is an appearance by Nobel Laureate Michael Mann, who provides readers with a detailed description of his personal multiple climate nightmares and depressive breakdowns.

Mann and Parmesan probably hope that baring their souls to the world will stir feelings of empathy, amongst people who haven’t warmed to their science. However I suspect that repeatedly revealing in depth, just how alien and strange the leaders of the climate alarmist movement are, will have the opposite effect to what they intend. People who can’t enjoy a pleasant sunny day, without experiencing intense depression, are in a mental state pretty far removed from what I think most people would consider “normal”.


Note: Parmesan might also be depressed because her work claiming extinction of the Edith’s Checkerspot butterfly was found to be horribly wrong.

0 0 votes
Article Rating

Discover more from Watts Up With That?

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

178 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Curious George
July 14, 2015 11:14 am

“professionally depressed” – that may happen if you pretend to be a professional. A true professional admits an error.

asybot
Reply to  Curious George
July 14, 2015 12:28 pm

+1

asybot
Reply to  asybot
July 14, 2015 12:30 pm

I should also add, is this a new profession? Being depressed? What University do I go to Penn State or the one in Oz or England?

jez
Reply to  Curious George
July 14, 2015 5:06 pm

I am a keen amateur depressive in my spare time — and a pretty damn good one, if you want to know — but I was unaware that it is a profession as well.
What are the hours like?

asybot
Reply to  jez
July 14, 2015 10:33 pm

If you want to be a true professional depressed ? 24/7, no ups my friend everything is down. That is what it is like to be professionally depressed . No such thing as “A keen amateur depressive in your spare time” , gee that statement makes me feel depressed you’re weaseling!

Gamecock
July 14, 2015 11:15 am

“Climate change will destroy earth.”
Nah. This big dirt ball will keep flying around the sun, no matter what we do.

July 14, 2015 11:17 am

Frankly, I think it’s disgusting, one of them is drinking, one of them is smoking, one is doing the old superglue through the paper bag thing and another one has one his hands on the family jewels.
Disgraceful – shame on you Eric.
Pointman

TonyL
Reply to  Pointman
July 14, 2015 11:43 am

Another mind utterly ruined by the internet.

MarkW
Reply to  Pointman
July 14, 2015 5:16 pm

Of course if you went straight from the super glue to the family jewels, it could be embarrassing.

Reply to  MarkW
July 15, 2015 2:42 am

Sticky, to say the least.
Pointman

LeeHarvey
July 14, 2015 11:34 am

And what of those of us who want to kick puppies when we’re subjected to alarmism? Where’s our cry for sympathy?

Just an engineer
Reply to  LeeHarvey
July 15, 2015 5:58 am

Rather kick pseudo-scientists!

Evan Jones
Editor
Reply to  LeeHarvey
July 16, 2015 4:55 pm

Aiieee!

July 14, 2015 11:38 am

I wonder if they all feel bad about the CO2 that was generated and released in making the materials for that worthless sign.

RWturner
July 14, 2015 11:39 am

Who would have guessed that someone dull enough to think the planet is imperiled is also emotionally unstable?

Latitude
Reply to  RWturner
July 14, 2015 5:15 pm

+11111111111

Gary Pearse
July 14, 2015 11:52 am

Is there not a psychiatrist in the world that knows that this epidemic of depression is from the ‘pause’? Why do you think NOAA/NCAR pinched their nostrils and bent the pause out of existence when their patience ran out. They know this is what is big, really big. Its actually being cooling since 2005/06 -~ a decade. This is what is scaring the hell out of them. Com’on blaming sceptics for their health woes. The-end-is-nigh types have been known to be cuckoo for centuries. They’ve just not been paid so handsomely for it. It was easy to vilify sceptics and they are doing it more hysterically, but now it is nature doing the damage to their livelihoods and careers. It must be a terrible strain to be faced with the possibility that you have wasted half a lifetime and most of a career being dead wrong. Avoiding facing this causes clinical depression – it has a venerable term …err …denial.

asybot
Reply to  Gary Pearse
July 14, 2015 10:34 pm

not enough +’s

kim
July 14, 2015 11:53 am

Fundamentally, the world is catching on that the climate alarm was exaggerated, you know, the old boy crying wolf bit. Eliciting this sort of sympathy is pathognomonic for a guilty conscience.
It might have worked but for all the damages and deaths. There will be little sympathy for the most egregious of the alarmists. They’ve been far too destructive.
=================

Reply to  kim
July 14, 2015 12:52 pm

You mean as in James Hansen and his cohort being directly responsible for the deaths of many thousands of elderly fuel-poverty victims each winter? So he could continue his grandstand arrests and rake in his lucrative speaking fees?
Criminals in the vein of Goebbels with the big lie, deflecting the truth with terms like “death trains” and “deniers”.

Reply to  BobM
July 14, 2015 1:57 pm

BobM – exaggerated, maybe – possibly for effect – and I suggest that Hansen and the rest of his little gang – are not ‘Directly’ responsible.
Though there may be politicians in the UK, who have bought into – the racist and even genocidal, I venture to flag up – nonsense, who are much less indirectly responsible.
Hansen; the Mann-made guy; several other – indirectly, useful-idiot – responsibility-bearers.
Post turtles all.
Auto

Reply to  BobM
July 14, 2015 2:46 pm

Yes, of course exaggerated, intentionally, to mimic the content and tone of some of what gets lobbed in from the other side almost daily. A reminder that what goes around comes around. And no, I don’t think Hansen is personally responsible for any specific crime other than what he’s gotten arrested for, but he’s been an outspoken supporter of the policies which have lead to the fuel-poverty consequences fully documented by others.

Reply to  kim
July 14, 2015 8:57 pm

“pathognomonic ”
Wow, not often I learn a new word.
Thanks Kim!

kim
Reply to  Menicholas
July 15, 2015 9:45 am

When I get bored learning new words I make ’em up.
=============

Reply to  Menicholas
July 15, 2015 3:19 pm

gzackly!

tadchem
July 14, 2015 12:04 pm

When your entire livelihood is dependent upon gathering funds from the public trough, and you have learned that the louder the alarm you sound the more funding flows your way, you will spend a lot of time looking for the biggest, reddest panic buttons to push. Your choice…
Naturally this fosters a nihilistic mind-set that focuses on negativity.
You develop the contrary of what, in the days of Norman Vincent Peale, was called ‘Positive Thinking.’
If you weren’t a depressed and depressing person when you started, you will soon become one.
One might use this as a process exemplifying “Evil to him who evil thinks.”
…sort of a psychological version of “You are what you eat”, or for the more scripturally inclined, “As you sow, so shall you reap.”
The adages covering this are endless, and many throughout history have learned the cogent message, often at deep personal expense.
But still there are those who would rather repeat history than learn from it.

CaligulaJones
July 14, 2015 12:12 pm

I dunno…aren’t these types the kind of people who use the rather biased word “overpopulation”, meaning too many humans?
So, what is the problem now that we’re all going to die? Won’t that be good for the planet?

TRM
July 14, 2015 12:18 pm

Sorry but I just have to ….

or

Dave
July 14, 2015 12:23 pm

In a future world (one where the climate change meme comes crashing to ground like a bad Ponzi scheme), we might see a paper published with a title such as this…
Realistic Fury: The Effect of Truthful Ideation on the Mental Health of Climate Scam Artists
Author: Stephan Lewandowsky
Presuming that Lew isn’t retired when that day comes, he will certainly be looking for a new bandwagon (and source of funding) to jump on. His demonstrated lack of morals would come in handy when trying a Benedict Arnold-like move in order to come over to the other side of the debate.

Reply to  Dave
July 14, 2015 2:02 pm

Dave,
Neither of us think Lew is a paragon.
none the less, may I suggest:
” His perceived lack of morals . . .”
Feel less uncomfortable?
Auto

July 14, 2015 12:26 pm

The thing is that Jim Steele has communicated extensively with Camille Parmesan about her work. She knows for a fact that it’s wrong. And yet, there she is, insistent as ever.
That Washington Post story is a stomach-turner, alright, with one analytically incompetent climate ersatz-scientist after another agonizing over their insider knowledge of doomsday, their hurt feelings over being disputed, and those horrid skeptics who just won’t understand!

Reply to  Pat Frank
July 14, 2015 1:02 pm

And McIntyre has published how bad Mann paleoclimate is. Both Parmesan and Mann KNOW their stuff is worse than just wrong. It is knowingly wrong. But it bought them first class seats on the global warming train.
There are only two possibilities given WaPo says they both profess dispair. One, they are dissembling to keep up the false facade. That is evil. Two, they truely are mentally ‘deficient’ in same way doomsday cultists are. It even possible both conditions obtain simultaneously, as with James Jones and his cyanide Cool Aid. Parmesan and Mann, serving up their spiked climate cool aid.

Reply to  ristvan
July 14, 2015 4:52 pm

Agreed, Rud, though I suspect that some of their emotional state may be sublimated worry that they may be exposed. Especially Mann. He’s been hiding his work for going on 20 years. He knows if it ever really got out, his lie would be exposed. That has to keep him awake at 2 am, some nights.
It occurred to me to wonder whether Camille Parmesan fled to the UK to get away from Jim Steele’s critical perceptions.

kim
Reply to  ristvan
July 15, 2015 9:55 am

Were it not for the significance of the ‘Crook’t Stick’ I might be able to forgive the Piltdown Mann his sequestered R values; he was a young, inexperienced researcher, seeking his puerile arrogant way in academia and politics. It is another matter to forgive his manipulation of subsequent proxy series in an attempt to validate his first ones.
In this he had the connivance, the active assistance, yes, the conspiracy of his academic and political peers. Don’t just damn him, but damn him, surely. And them.
==================================

Reply to  ristvan
July 16, 2015 12:09 pm

Bradley and Hughes must have known what went into MBH98/99, Kim. If they didn’t they were professionally remiss. If they did, they were co-conspirators.
And even if they did not know at the time, they should have become very alarmed when Steve M. revealed the contents of Mann’s ‘BACK to 1400 CENSORED‘ directory. So far as I know, they evinced no alarm and did nothing to correct the record. Events don’t speak well of them.

Reply to  ristvan
July 16, 2015 12:17 pm

More on the CENSORED directory. And Bradley defending it.
As TCO noted, the CENSORED directory is scandalous.

diogenese2
July 14, 2015 12:29 pm

Perhaps what is depressing the cheese lady is the insidious thought that Jim Steele was right all along.
But think yourself back to 2005, the high tide of the Global Warming Narrative ahead of “Gettysburg” at Copenhagen 2009. Given that the evidence for the narrative was spread across a score of specialities and the proof buried deep in reports of 700 pages referencing thousands of peer reviewed papers, what was a poor lepidopterist to do but buy the Lewandowsky Paradox that
the truth of the narrative was so obvious that doubt was prima facia evidence of cognitive disorder.
No-one is more susceptible to the “argument from authority” than those who themselves are “authorities” , since doubt undermines their own status.
Thus – accepting the “narrative” biased her own research work, which was then catalogued as “evidence” for the narrative.
How many more committed scientists are now waiting for “Captain Ahab to catch up with them”
(h/t John Le Carre) or seeking exit strategies from the biggest error they have ever made?
Make no mistake, the political imperative that provided the driver is about to reverse at a speed that only politics, which will sacrifice anybody, however eminent, can accomplish.
Again John Le Carre; “when a cover runs – it runs like an old sock”.

Reply to  diogenese2
July 14, 2015 1:28 pm

Nice observations. The tide has turned. UK, Australia, more and more US states, India, … Paris will fail ; in a palpable sense (GCF, binding commitments) it already has. The whole thing will likely unravel rapidly thereafter. Rapidly still meaning a few years given all the institutional momentum built up through Copenhagen 2009. We need to start working on culpability for the perps.
A suggestion. UN did not stop Russia’s annexation of Crimea, nor China’s island building agression in the Spratly’s. WHO incompetent on Ebola. No UN action on multiple refugee crises. UNFCC the main perp on the CAGW thing. Simple. Tell the UN rent and property taxes are due in New York, and the US is ceasing its UN contributions until it cleans up its act. Why fund a toothless annex 2 lobbying institution impotent against annex 1 aggression?

kim
Reply to  ristvan
July 15, 2015 10:04 am

We have always been at war with an Axis. Heh, all axes meet within our annex.
============

H.R.
July 14, 2015 12:31 pm

The picture? Too funny!
I added it to my picture library so it will rotate through when my screen saver is up (I use ‘Slide Show’ option for screen saver).
One of my other favorites that’s in the rotation is the Global Warming Protesters:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DvM7m7RJqkg/TSNi–JmrRI/AAAAAAAABWQ/PU6lsDRiv-A/s1600/Global-warming-protest-copy1.jpg

Reply to  H.R.
July 14, 2015 2:07 pm

Brilliant – saved to my rotating screen-saver, too.
Hugely appreciated.
I have also got the London Bus with the advert ‘We are in Drought’ – in a London downpour, brollies everywhere, about eighty yards/metres from my then office.
Again, H.R. awesomely appreciated!
Auto

H.R.
Reply to  auto
July 14, 2015 7:25 pm

“I have also got the London Bus with the advert ‘We are in Drought’ – in a London downpour, brollies everywhere, about eighty yards/metres from my then office.”
That one sounds like a laugh, Auto… Ah! Here it is.
http://randomlylondon.com/wp-content/uploads/in-drought.jpg
Thanks for returning the favor. I’ll add that to mine.

Bryan A
Reply to  H.R.
July 15, 2015 6:04 pm

Ah the Copenhagen COP15 from December 2009 to bad it isn’t in the WIKI article on COP15

July 14, 2015 12:35 pm

Left this in the comments under the ‘article’ at the Washington Post:

“‘Camille Parmesan’ is NOT win any part of a Nobel Peace Prize winner!
It is a shame that the author couldn’t bother to do any fact checking, especially since this fact is easily checked.
Ms. Parmesan’s paper (correspondence that got published and utilized by the IPCC) was found, subsequently to be wrong. The ‘Edith’s Checkerspot butterfly’ is not in danger of extinction from ‘climate change’ nor are the butterflies extinct in the areas she based her paper on. Camille Parmesan chose to misinterpret locale changes as the plant growth matures, and instead claimed climate change was the cause.
What Ms. Parmesan, Mr. Mann and the others need is visits to therapists; not to go weeping about their failures to gullible newspaper authors.”

Reply to  ATheoK
July 14, 2015 2:15 pm

ATheo
But Parma is in Europe, and the EU – so all Parmesans – like all Londoners, Munchenites, Nicois, Oportoites, etc – won the Nobel thingummy.
Nothing to do with Lepidoptera, but just geography.
I must say, being a Nobelliard has not notably transformed my life, nor those of the 500 million or so other co-joint-laureates, so far as I have noticed.
But it’s nice to self-recognise.
Auto – joint-co-fraternal Nobelliard-of Europe.

Reply to  auto
July 14, 2015 6:39 pm

Sorry, Auto.
If her name isn’t on the ‘Nobel Peace Prize’ list of honor, explicitly, then she wasn’t honored with a Nobel Peace Prize.
Auto might still be on the list; please apply to the EU for your share so we can be happy for you, (and envious).
I have little doubt that Mann and likely Parmesan are keeping scrapbooks; though, Mann’s scrapbook will be the only one with his personal corrections of history.

PiperPaul
Reply to  ATheoK
July 14, 2015 2:25 pm

The comments there are not too sympathetic towards our true believer “scientists”.

jpatrick
July 14, 2015 12:37 pm

I don’t doubt that Camille Parmesan and Michael Mann really believe that the climate is warming due to human activities. Now, what is it called when someone believes something that is false?
Psychologists call that delusion.
If the falsity of the belief cannot be proven, then it is a religion.

July 14, 2015 12:44 pm

So I have a friend who had the good fortune to own land in the Columbia Gorge wind farm corridor. Resulted in leases to build windmills. On the way to construction of course there are a zillion Alphabet soup of agencies that have to sign off in order for a permit to be issued. Among them the Corps of Engineers who, of course, have an obligation to evaluate for any possible indigenous peoples artifacts or historical sites. This resulted in a visit by tribal representatives who made note of some piled stone “fox holes” near the cliffs that overlook the Columbia River. One of the tribal reps allowed that they didn’t know for sure but MAYBE these were birthing stations. Actually got down in one and “assumed the position” to show how a woman could brace herself during childbirth. Indian artifacts are not something a landowner wants to find around these parts as it is effectively a subornation your property rights. So the landowner poured through local history and newspapers to see if there was anything identifying what the pits might have been used for back in the day. Finally in some old family photos there they were… a crew of guys with their take lined out in front of them and the GOOSE BLINDS clearly being used in the early 50’s.
Warmists and environmentalists truly making stuff up and believing it deeply is not new.

Paul Coppin
Reply to  fossilsage
July 15, 2015 9:23 am

Oral history is only as valid as the parchment its written on…

kim
Reply to  Paul Coppin
July 15, 2015 10:05 am

My wind is my bond.
=======

observa
Reply to  fossilsage
July 16, 2015 7:59 am

The Goose Blinders usurped those traditional tribal birthing pits? Shame on them and off to reconciliation and re-education camps with their progeny.

July 14, 2015 12:54 pm

A requisite for being a climate activist is a minor in the Fine Arts (Acting).

Stephen Richards
July 14, 2015 12:54 pm

The whole thing is a bit cheesy to me

July 14, 2015 12:58 pm

In 2009, after the Copenhagen conference, a United Church minister had a public meltdown over the conference’s failure to save the world. I often wonder whether humanity has a hardwired need to be deeply afraid. The First World lives in an unprecedented time of peace and affluence and yet we are filled with fears of the most imaginative sort. CO2 has become the 21st century’s witchcraft.

brent
July 14, 2015 12:59 pm

World Mental Health Day – 10 October
http://www.who.int/mental_health/world-mental-health-day/en/
http://www.who.int/mental_health/management/en/
IPCC drumming up business for another UN institution, the WHO. What a racket!

Say What?
July 14, 2015 1:01 pm

Political snake oil for sale by the conCENSORED science peddlers.

Charlie
July 14, 2015 1:25 pm

The wussification of the west. Science shouldn’t be an episide of Oprah.

lgp
July 14, 2015 1:28 pm

For some Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) has been supplanted by Climatic Affective Disorder (CAD).