I lose sleep over climate change almost every single night. I can’t remember how long this has been happening, but it’s been quite a while, and it’s only getting worse. I confess: I need help.
A few years ago, I shared my climate change depression on Twitter, and the response was overwhelming. One of my tweets rose up the alt-truth ranks all the way to Fox News, where one host called me a “kook” for publicly expressing my feelings about the environment. Other responses were more empathic. Hundreds of people wrote to me admitting their own personal struggles under the weight of an unraveling world. This was a consolation of sorts. I realized that I am not alone in experiencing a kind of environmental dread.
Like many people who care about the fate of the planet, I’ve spent most of the past year alternating between soul-crushing despair and headstrong hope. My personal situation, however, is a bit unusual in that I get paid to be a climate-science communicator.
I’m a meteorologist by training and a journalist by profession. For the past 12 years, I’ve focused every working day on understanding, explaining, and trying to alleviate the effects of climate change. Yet global carbon emissions are more than 20 percent higher now than when I started work as a climate journalist. It’s difficult not to internalize some of this as a personal failure. “I should be telling that story better,” I’ll tell myself, as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to climb. The regret is catching up to me.
For now at least, the good days are enough to keep me going. But there are also days when I’m paralyzed. Case in point: This very essay. It sat open in a window on my computer for nearly 11 months, begging to be completed. Yet I resisted. Confronting the existential dread that climate change infuses into nearly every aspect of my life just isn’t something I want to spend my time doing.
About a year ago, I went to see a counselor for anxiety. He seemed unprepared for my emotional crisis. His simple advice was, “Do what you can.” Easier said than done, of course, but the advice helped me to realize something important: We are all in this together.
But for some reason, I still have a hard time talking about these emotional challenges in person. Climate change and mental health are still fairly taboo subjects in polite company (even if these aren’t days in which being polite gets one very far). Over the past several months, I’ve stopped talking about climate change with my parents, my wife, and my sister in order to avoid heated dialogue about what I think is the most important issue in the world. Instead, I’ve privately sought out personal advice from other scientists and journalists, and often commiserated with strangers. My support network has become those who are going through the same emotional crisis.
I know that cutting out my family is a defensive strategy. I know it can’t last forever. In ordinary times, I would welcome any chance to include my loved ones in my life’s work. But right now, I feel like I have to restrain myself from opening up about how I really feel to protect whatever seeds of hope I have left. I don’t know if it’s the right decision, but I know that I need to preserve my own well-being to continue to fight for the planet.
This article appeared in the March/April 2018 edition with the headline “Climate Change Blues.”
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Yes, as a participant in a whiny pathetic concerted media storm focusing on allegedly depressed climate scientists and activists.
Many of who claimed that the depression was caused by lack of government and popular effort.
Claims that ignore trillions of dollars spent on climate science, without progress.
The glitzy glamorous international travel, conventions and meetings consisting of alarmists and shills flying virtue flags while announcing their noble cause corruptions; all without accomplishing or advancing science.
Not to overlook how this mental afflictions caused massive damage to science, scientific method, scientific credibility and respect for science.
Nor have these delusional activists learned anything over the decades. Instead they worship bad people who publish and support the worst research, imaginable.
You can save and restore yourself, Eric.
Divest and rid yourself of everything derived from or constructed using fossil fuels.
Rely solely on the foods you personally harvest.
Spend your days working for farmers. I recommend you start with a dairy farmer; their mornings start before dawn every day. Every day, rain, shine, drought, snow, windy, stormy, flooding, whatever! Maybe you learn about growing plants for food along the way?
Your internal moral compass should reset withing a year or two.
The fact that you, personally will be utterly unable to discern CO₂ warming, should help.
I suggest you read, by daylight, books following the industrial revolution history, coupled with selected books about Jonas Salk, Louis Pasteur, Madame Curie and any books about advances in science, food and medicine that brought average human lifespan to it’s current heights.
Watching a number of Richard Feynman lectures would help.
I can almost guarantee that by the end of your first week working hard at a dairy farm, you’ll be sleeping through the night.
Yes I worry all the time about the coming “Rapture” or a meteorite hitting me. Thank goodness for alcohol!
Mods:
Please help?
It appears another of my posts went to wordpress’s spam bucket. Could you help with another of your miracle interventions?
Thank you mods!!
Heroes, every one of you!
Worry about that unknown asteroid that’s going to end the world or was it the over due super volcano…oh well which ever. There that should get you over your climate concern.
Yes, Anthony, I would probaby run a “test” every once in a while if I had a blog with lots of followers.
Here in the UK we usually call them Greenhauses.
Quite amusing though.
I sincerely hope it was indeed a “test” otherwise it indicates you might be bored. Which would be a shame.
Eric Holthaus needs to get him some Geico-style psychotherapy.
(warning: not the original version)
In the old days, a straight jacket and a padded cell were used to treat such symptoms of derangement.
And lobotomies
What a thing to worry about. Too bad AGW isn’t true. A more serious concern is how many ants are there in that nest. Memory has no place in thinking like an AGWer. Which prediction came true????
I worry about the greens getting so crazy that we loose refrigeration or packaging that keeps our food safe. Or hospitals, business, or a host of other industries that keep us from living like savages.
Making a mountain out of a mole hill, or his worry doesn’t amount to a pile of beans.
Yet global carbon emissions are more than 20 percent higher now than when I started work as a climate journalist.
Perhaps he ought to go and work in China then!
The prophecy of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Cooling… Warming… Climate Change is a first-order forcing of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Soul-crushing Despair which is a first-order forcing of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Sleepless Nights. Lose your faith in the prophecy and you free yourself from despair and insomnia. Win-win.
Most people need a couple of years worth of Resilience Training to counter all the Fragility they’ve been taught.
Also, take the darned long view. Look over millions of years and the gradual sequestration of carbon over that time and where that leads. Not only am I not panicked about CO2 in the atmosphere increasing, I’m HUGELY relieved. FAR FAR FAR better than the reverse.
About the most logical response to CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere that I have seen. The ice ages in the more recent history of the earth and the disappearance of CO2 may have been a symptom of a dying planet. Human beings may have been injected to cure the problem for a while. A rejuvenation treatment if you will.
My greatest fear are people like him. Especially when they get into power.
Don’t worry. O’Barmy won’t come back.
no, but someone just as bad or worse could easily do so. After all, we almost got shrillary.
“soul-crushing despair”
Aaaaand …. letmeguess … he’s anti-religion and doesn’t believe in the soul. (But he’s …*ahem* …”spiritual”.)
How can these loons not see that they are members of Doomsday Cult #1,327,698?
Dear Eric,
I once read an article about a person who suddenly stopped worrying about global warming, after viewing the difference between rural an urban temperatures. Because he then realized that most of the warming is caused by urban heat. I cannot find the article, but I found a same kind of comparison, here on WUWT:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/26/a-new-paper-comparing-ncdc-rural-and-urban-us-surface-temperature-data/
Hope this helps!
Take it easy. It’s all in your mind. There is no catastrophe.
Wish you a good night of sleep and many more to come.
Life’s good!
Best regards,
Scarface
Also, if I had to pick one thing to worry about, that thing would be poverty. The root of all misery. Good thing is that global poverty has declined dramatically in the last few decades (although our objective media rarely if ever mentions this), although we still have work to do. And there are always forces trying to harm that progress by instituting expensive energy or restricting trade and people’s freedoms.
Eric; I suspect your problem is that you only talk, and listen, to people who are just as fanatical as you are. This creates a positive feedback loop where the situation seems to become ever more extreme and catastropic. Your need to realise however its not necessarily realistic. Think about the Orson Wells broadcast of War of the Worlds early in the 20th century and the intense panic that ensued.
I believe there is a very real and tangible solution to your problem. You need to break the positive feedback loop; there is a way to do it, one that sounds simple but in reality is anything but. Go talk to some serious knowledgeable skeptics and really listen to their point of view. Look honestly and with an open mind at their data and analysis. Daebate with them, explain the basis of your concerns and see what their take is.
At worst you will come away with a better understanding of both point of view. But I strongly suspect, the process if not indeed the outcome will rationalise your concerns to the point where you can be objective and unemotional enough to have a happy normal life.
Please understand, I am not taking the micky, I mean the above very sincerely both for your well being and maybe even the planet’s.
Nice parody. Never realized these folks could be that humorous.
The last sentence does not so much sound like depression to me but more like that other affliction of many activists: megalomania.
Yet global carbon emissions are more than 20 percent higher now than when I started work as a climate journalist.
…and nothing noteworthy has happened. What does this tell you?
Could his stress be caused by guilt?
He has been pushing the catastrophic man-made climate change scam and realises how much harm that has done.
“caused by guilt ..realises how much harm that has done.”
Yes but I don’t blame those who have been fooled – I blame those who intentionally did the fooling while knowing there is no truth to the climate propaganda they’ve been thriving on; it is they who have blood on their hands.
http://fortune.com/2018/04/15/david-buckel-brooklyn-self-immolate/
There could be tens or even hundreds of thousands of delicate/impressionable people, especially young ones, out there who are truly frightened by this hoax. Even if they don’t resort to David Buckel’s decision, their lives are still being adversely affected in ways probably most of us cannot relate to, living in constant fear because of a relatively small cabal of despicable thugs both in science and in media profiteering from their efforts to keep this hoax alive.
You have put your finger on it. Nobody is having significant adverse effects from AGW but millions are feeling adverse effects mentally, emotionally, financially and healthwise from the constant exaggeration of danger and government policies meant to fight Climate change.
Consider the character assassinations prevalent on most warmist sites that are used as a substitute for hard science.
The media and governments that use the hype are murderers but justify themselves by calling it a war (on climate change, capitalism big business or overpopulation.) Somehow they feel a morality in war. It is beyond all reason.
I have some sympathy. I know intelligent people who are convinced that the whole AGW scenario is true. Once they get committed, they argue that converse data is fabricated, that 97% can’t be wrong and that the world’s press would not all lie. etc. etc.
If I loose sleep, which I do occasionally, it is because of the problems that will arise when the fraud becomes public knowledge, and public trust in science disintegrates.
MM emissions are only a small percentage of global emissions. To be up by 20% is not possible.
Don’t harsh the man’s guilt complex, dude! It’s all he’s got left. Evenhis dog is going with his wife!
As all men know, the major problem facing any man is, well, … ‘shrinkage.’ There, I said it. And, if assuming one is daf enough not to trust me on this, they only need ask George Costanza.
And, every man knows the major cause of … ‘shrinkage’ (it’s even hard to repeat) is the cold. Cold air, cold water, can turn any proud, red-blooded male into an itsy, flaccid, micro worm.
What’s the antidote? You know it, and I know it. And Eric knows it too.
It’s warmth. Glorious warmth. Warmth causes expansion. Glorious expansion.
Change Doctors-quick!
It appears that the one you ‘saw’ did not take you or your mental health seriously. Find one who does.
P.S. “people’ on the internet (Twitter etc) are not your friends. They are spectators. Use discretion.
Good Luck