Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Scientific American thinks we are all so worried about climate change, our minds have snapped – that we’ve all turned to “climate denial” as a coping mechanism.
Are We Feeling Collective Grief Over Climate Change?
The idea is highly controversial, but at least one psychiatrist is convinced that we are, whether we know it or not.
In 1977, I was in middle school in Michigan, and a science teacher shared a tidbit off-curriculum. Some scientists had postulated that as a result of “pollution,” heat-trapping gasses might one day lead to a warming planet. Dubbed “the greenhouse effect,” the image was clear in my 12-year old mind: people enclosed in a glass structure, heating up like tomatoes coaxed to ripen. It was an interesting concept, but something in the very, very distant future.
Fast-forward ~ 30 years later. The year was 2006, my daughter was three, and my dreams of a White Christmas were going to hell in a hand basket. There wasn’t a snowflake to be seen in Brooklyn and it was DECEMBER—a far cry from childhood memories of jumping off the roof into fluffy mounds after a blizzard. Something was awry. An Inconvenient Truth had just been released, and those graphs and slides were suspiciously coinciding with what we were beginning to see in the form of extreme weather, à la Hurricane Katrina. Any number of idioms might well have marked the juncture: “canaries in the coal mine” comes to mind.
So why weren’t we coming together to nip this in the bud? Why were we failing to embrace what appeared to be so obvious?
The deterioration of our planet—the only home we have ever known and an assurance we used to take for granted—is bound to elicit a wide range of emotions in different individuals. Mourning is personal, but as a species, could it be that we are making our way through the stages of grief as outlined by the late Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross?
Psychiatrist and climate activist Lise Van Susteren, M.D. doesn’t necessarily think so. She points out that the Kübler-Ross framework was a response to people who hear devastating news and feel personally very involved, extremely vulnerable and know that the diagnosis is essentially inescapable.
“That’s not where most people are with climate,” Dr. Van Susteren states. “It takes a long time for some people to lay down the sense within that something is true.”
…
[James] Hansen believes people are moving in the direction of accepting that climate is changing and that humans are at least a factor if not the dominant factor.
But there is also the matter of our wiring.
“Denial is something that allows us sometimes to get through the day,” says Dr. Van Susteren. “And in some cases that’s really good, that’s adaptive, but in other cases it’s going to kill you . . . and this one’s going to kill you.”
…
Read more: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/are-we-feeling-collective-grief-over-climate-change/
If I’m feeling any grief, it is grief that an allegedly scientific magazine which I once respected could publish such mush. Few credible skeptics ever claimed humans have absolutely no influence on climate, but there is a huge gulf between predicting a mild, almost undetectable climatic nudge, and predicting an immininent planetary emergency.
If there is any “climate denial” occurring, it is a refusal by some parties to face the fact that climate models which predict global catastrophe have failed. There is no surge in sea levels, there is no accelerated rise in temperature, other than the gentle warming which started well before anthropogenic CO2 became a factor, and there is no increase in storm activity.
Claims that previously unanticipated “inertia” is preventing the manifestation of all these apocalyptic events, in my opinion is a frantic last ditch effort to defend broken theories from falsification.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The only grief I’m feeling is for the money we’re throwing away on this non-problem to protect future generations when present generations really need help (Syrian refugees, people without clean drinking water, those suffering from AIDS, the list goes on). If these warmists were really concerned about mankind, that’s where their concern could make a real, difference.
Snowfall in Brooklyn:
YES, 0″
in December 2006 ; and 12″ for the season. (1900 had only 9″ total).
However in 2010, there was 20″ in Dec and 36″ in Jan for a season total of 62 inches! More than any year between 1900 and 1920.
Of course these comparisons mean……….absolutely nothing!
Shame on the author and shame on Scientific American.
Question: So, the media and climate-hysteric scientists poopoo and make fun of The Farmer’s Almanac for trying to predict the forecast for the upcoming winter season. Yet, these same anti-Farmer’s Almanac people would have us believe that their 50-100 year forecasts are golden???
I grieved for the lost integrity of the global media 25 years ago. Since then, I’ve had a healthy disrespect for anything printing in such organs. I assume that the organ has decided on a party line and needs a story to justify it, rather than the organ seeks to inform its readership based on rigorous journalists investigating in a proper manner.
Having spent much of my life out of doors, I have a healthy amount of real experience imprinted on my brain, in terms of snow falls, rainfall, hurricanes, abnormal temperatures (both warm and cold, in summer and in winter) etc etc. I don’t trust for one second what journalists tell me happened in the 1980s, I trust what I recall vividly happening at that time based on my own real life experience. I watch with disdain London journalists in hysterics claiming that 10cm of snow is ‘evidence of climate change’, when 10cm of snow is a piffling amount and I have photographic evidence of 25cm of snow in our back garden in the early 1980s, with our dog’s legs almost completely buried in the stuff.
I watch with disdain talk of the UK’s ‘heatwaves’ when I recall vividly the summer of 1976 when the sun shone from May until the end of August, temperatures were regularly in the 1990s and a drought more serious than any other in my lifetime took place.
I’m fairly sanguine about what happened in December 2010 in terms of snow and cold, because I was around when similar happened in December 1981. I’m not overly bothered by the snowfall in Scotland in winter 2015, as I remember winter 1994 when the ski lifts at Glencoe were all buried at Easter time and there were still huge swathes of snow in carries of the Skye Cuillin at midsummer.
I don’t grieve about climate change.
I grieved the loss of the profession of journalism. And my grief was done by 1990 and I have dealt with the real situation ever since……
“Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” …. read it!
The deterioration of our planet—the only home we have ever known and an assurance we used to take for granted—
WHAT deterioration?!!! Define it- in objective terms- and provide concrete, verifiable evidence. SA is being decidedly UN-scientific. They’re just a propaganda rag now.
If only Richard Feynman were still around…
I’ll just quote, again, from Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds: “I’ll believe there is a climate crisis when the people telling me there is a climate crisis ACT like there is a climate crisis”.
When the rich warmunists who fund climate alarmism move begin to move away from the coasts…then I might start listening to them.
Until then, another quote from Instapundit: “I don’t want to hear another goddam word about MY carbon footprint”.
How is anything in that article remotely “scientific”? It’s a subjective view of how things “used to be”. When I was 12 years old we rode our bikes to school right up until the Christmas break. That was 1976 and I live at 50 degrees north latitude, a fair bit further north than “New York”.
Does that mean I’m adding to the “data”? Hell no, it’s an anecdote, nothing more, nothing less. If I scrape the sides of my memory I can tell you that we’ve had multiple years of no snow right up to Christmas, but no discernible pattern really, other than to say maybe one in every ten years or so. It’s about as idiotic as saying that the snowbanks aren’t as big as when I was a kid (duh, I grew). Sadly now I measure snowfall by how high the piles are at the side of the driveway. Last year, not even waist height. The year before, over my head. On noes, the climate is warming. I fear Scientific American may have been surpassed by Sports Illustrated in terms of scientific content and quality (and that’s not saying much at all).
The swimsuit issue is very scientific. Female anatomy is a science, right?
I have sure spent a lot of time studying it like it was.
The ‘collective grief’ is a fairly definitive example of projection. As in, ‘if it’s me, it must be everybody’.
I’ve said a thousand times, now – the ONLY worry I have about Climate Change is what these single-minded jokers will force upon us and the planet to pacify their own paranoia.
Remember the ‘politics of fear?’ – that was a Progressive catch-phrase until – gosh, about 2008, I think. They seem to have forgotten that because now were supposed to be afraid of my own breath and a sunny day.
It’s what passes for political debate for those on the left.
Anti-science like this from Scientific American is why I dropped my subscription many years ago. It is little more than a left-wing rag by harpies.
The link to Scientific American doesn’t work, so I don’t know the author’s name….
What I find disturbing about this article is the the author and Van Susteren both seem INCAPABLE of appreciating that there are intelligent, well educated, scientifically literate people out there who have looked seriously at the claims of the AGW hypothesis, at the science behind it, and just don’t accept it. Or don’t accept it all. Or think that there might be nuggets of truth buried in a mass of hyperbole and really bad science.
There was a time, not that long ago, when most of us would see an article a a mainstream news outlet, or a popular science mag like the old SA, or in a science programme on radio or TV, that a scientist somewhere had come up with new facts, new interpretations of old facts based on some other new fact, a new hypothesis or a new technological development, and we would just accept it. We all knew that “Science” didn’t get everything right all the time, but because of the “Scientific Method” it did get most things more or less right, most of the time. Even if you were scientifically trained, and the article was about something close enough to your own discipline, you normally wouldn’t bother to check, because you trusted “Science”.
To become a sceptic, you have to lose that mind-set, and IT ISN’T EASY. To say that I am in denial because I can’t face the horror of the imminent End Of Life As We Know It, simply shows no appreciation of what made me (and others like me) into a sceptic.
When I look at their inability to comprehend the sceptic position, I’m afraid that the only thing that can save us from the insanity will be a period of cooling so extreme that no amount of adjustment can hide it. What a sorry thing to hope for.
“…the author and Van Susteren both seem INCAPABLE of appreciating that there are intelligent, well educated, scientifically literate people out there who have looked seriously at the claims of the AGW hypothesis, at the science behind it, and just don’t accept it.”
Indeed. Which makes them guilty of their own favorite indictment: “denying science.” After all, the science of Yale’s Prof Kahan et al. showed that we infidels are, if anything, *more* scientifically literate than the faithful.
Here’s an example of “climate grief”, by astrophysicist Dr. Katherine J. Mack of the University of Melbourne:
“Honestly climate change scares the heck out of me and it makes me so sad to see what we’re losing because of it.” 100% Appeal to Emotion, 0% logic, facts, or rationality. She’s an educated fool.
The author of the article says:
“Fast-forward ~ 30 years later. The year was 2006, my daughter was three, and my dreams of a White Christmas were going to hell in a hand basket. There wasn’t a snowflake to be seen in Brooklyn and it was DECEMBER”
I grew up near New York in the same period as the author, and there were virtually NO White Christmases then (1960s and 1970s), I remember to my great disappointment then.
The mid-Atlantic coast was (and is) seldom cold enough for snow in December. If it’s below freezing, it’s clear; if it’s cloudy, it’s likely above freezing.
This changes in January and February, when it is commonly cold enough for snow along the coast (although it often gets rain there in those months as well). This is just a mirror of the summer lag, where June is not the hottest month even though the days are longest — July and August are the hottest.
You must have missed the part where he said he lived in Michigan in the seventies.
‘Salright…so did I.
Huh… and here I always thought it was my strict adherence to proper application of the scientific method and logical principles. Who knew?
While the Brooklyn Bridge was being built, SA had frequent articles about the project. Roebling was doing it wrong.