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.”
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Prozac and viagra, and all his problems will be gone.
LOL! Basicly yeah. His story sounds a lot like mine (Generalized Anxiety Disorder). Still, it’s no laughing matter, he’s having terrible time.
They’re only models Eric. UN climate models to be exact – designed to frighten you. And it seems that they have proven a roaring success on you and many others.
Take solace that in reality, none of the doomsday predictions that you and your alarmist comrades have been spreading have come true. …. yet! Ha.
Just kidding. Hope you find yourself well soon. Real depression in whatever form is very, very painful. Exercise helps. And a strict ban on progressive media would do you a world of good. Really.
I quit newspapers and TV news for a few years and it improved my mental health.
Yes, they are free to worry all they like but many of their actions are having serious detrimental effects on the rest of us .At least Eric is admitting to a mental deficiency.
Hay Eric… Here’s a suggestion.
Suggest he restrict his reading to WUWT, after reading the NIPCC.
I fully support physician-assisted suicide for this “suffering” man. Nobody should have to live with such “pain” and “hopeless” future. And the good news is that Obamakkare will PAY for the procedure!! Win-win.
shame you lose by stooping so low as to wish another human being dead. Better to leave such death fantasies to the greens (such as the infamous 10:10 video)
What a whinny bitch! This guy needs a pin slip! I can’t even begin to express myself except that I wouldn’t even piss in his ear!
Kook? Kook? That is pretty mild for his state of mind. He is way beyond ‘kook’ and beyond ‘snowflake’ status. In the lingo of my days working in the mental hospital, that guy suffers from a state of chronic, undifferentiated bananas!
“Climate journalist”…dafuq?
He sounds less like a meteorologist and more like just a weather reader on a local TV channel. One would hope that a trained professional would be a tad more rational.
And now I feel I have ‘preclinical virtually acquired post pre-traumatic stress anxiety’.
Does this put him on the FAA “No Fly” list or he NICS Gun Ban lists?
No sympathy from this guy for someone who should have heeded Sgt. Hulka’s advice:
You let this sit in an open window on your laptop for 11 months? Just think, you could have persuaded President Trump from withdrawing from the almighty climate….statement. You could have talked China and India from increasing their carbon footprint. Your procrastination will now doom us all!! Thanks, thanks alot!…
Since there is little chance of extraction from your mental prison I can only recommend alcoholism and womanizing. It might keep you from hanging your self until your subconscious finds a way to escape.
A lot more fun but may not be good for your mental health.
Take two Midol and snuggle up to Oprah.
All this extra CO2 in the atmosphere is causing me too have to cut the lawn more often. Grass is growing like crazy down here in Mississippi. Might have to go out and buy a new lawn mower soon. I lose sleep worrying about lots of stuff but not global warming.
My lawn is growing like crazy, too. I have to do a little mowing just about every day to keep up with it.
It’s not easy being green.
Have a friend who is permanently alarmed about a whole raft of things. Supervolcanism, coronal mass ejections, gamma-ray bursters etc etc. I tell him that if you aren’t in control of it then there really isn’t any point in worrying about it. In terms of climate the modern mountebanks assert sans evidence that we are in control of it.
Some are a bit cruel.
One of my neighbours has swallowed the CAGW bilge just as this poor “science communicator” has.
A nice fellow and a damn fine carpenter, but he fears for the future of his children, believes they will inherit a damaged earth.
He trusts authority.Our authorities have promoted Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming as a certainty, citing the UN IPCC yet claiming far more certitude than even those bureaucrats dare.
Yet he has never considered the past.
He knew not of past warmer periods, never considered that the laurentian ice sheets melted at an inordinate rate by todays standards, climate change means global warming in his world.
Every weather channel boogie man is real, biblical floods, extreme weather,unprecedented warmth…
The dread this man lives in is sad.
I wonder what his reaction will be when /if he finally thinks the government propaganda through.
Joy?
Or savage anger?
Our institutions are setting themselves up for a pretty nasty prat fall.
Seems most of those inside the government bureaus of fearmongering, all assume they will be retired on a generous pension before the backlash hits.
Of course given their performance to date,why should we pay them a pension?
Is it cheaper than jailing them for their career choices?
On the fright and dread front,it appears scepticism is necessary for ones mental health.
BS and Mass Hysteria should always be taken with a grain of salt.
The hysteria serves some vital function in his life. When it stops serving that function, he’ll move onto something else.
They are, however, a serious danger to the fabric of a logical society. Far more dangerous than any possible climate change.
Belittling people with whom you have differences (political, economic, social, or even scientific) is not ever going to help solve the problem. You people are just stroking your own sense of intellectual superiority, similar to the way some people engage in virtue signalling and moral preening.
There is no problem.
The “man” is a hypochondriac.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/climate-change-sea-ice-fell-lowest-level-human-civilization-w516838
30 years of crawling all bottled up inside us. You coulda heard a pin drop as the sceptics stopped and locked the door
A rather sad situation. Reminds me of the documentary featuring Michael Ruppert discussing Peak Oil and imminent global collapse. He was emotionally distraught over the situation. If sitting in a room together, one wonders what Michael and Eric would discuss. Each fears a consequence that they cannot definitively prove. Their discussion followed to its logical conclusion is a planet without man. No reasoned thought.
Most of you assume this guy is telling the truth – that he is suffering from some form of depression due to his false belief in global warming alarmism. But consider his education as a meteorologist – he really should know better.
I suggest there is another possibility – that he is simply writing false propaganda, intended to raise anxieties of others who are habitually fearful – a large segment of humanity.
Global warming alarmists (aka warmists) and extreme leftists are one-in-the-same, and they are typically dishonest – “any lie is OK, if it supports The Cause”.
Global warming alarmism is the new “false front” for economic Marxists, who were discredited after the fall of the Soviet Union circa 1990. Read Dr. Patrick Moore’s essay, “Hard Choices for the Environmental Movement”, written in 1994, especially “The Rise of Eco-Extremism”. I corresponded with Patrick on this essay and I think he “nailed it”. So did he.
http://ecosense.me/2012/12/30/key-environmental-issues-4/
Radical Greens and warmists are typically dishonest fanatics – nobody should believe or trust them.
Regards, Allan
agree 100%…..he writes this crap
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/climate-change-sea-ice-fell-lowest-level-human-civilization-w516838
Too true Latitude – this guy is a shrill professional climate alarmist – and maybe a paid shill for some extremist group.
FOR SLATE MAGAZINE ALONE, ERIC HOLTHAUS HAS WRITTEN OVER 400 VERY-SCARY CLIMATE CHANGE ARTICLES !
See from http://www.slate.com/authors.eric_holthaus.html
to http://www.slate.com/authors.eric_holthaus.16.html inclusive.
An Amazon Estuary of Climate Drivel !
Anyone stupid enough to believe this guy deserves to have anxiety issues.
THIS IS THE “CLIMATE CHANGE” ALARMISTS’ KEY STRATEGY:
“By having a vague theory, it’s possible to get either result.” – Richard Feynman.
“A theory that is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific.” – Karl Popper.
The “Climate Change” hypothesis is so vague, and changes so often, that it is not falsifiable and not scientific. It should be rejected as unscientific nonsense – the prattling of imbeciles.
The “Runaway Global Warming” hypothesis is at least falsifiable, and IT HAS BEEN ADEQUATELY FALSIFIED:
1. By the ~37-year global cooling period from ~1940 to 1977;
2. By “the Pause”, when temperature have not increased significantly since the mid-1990’s, despite major increases in atmospheric CO2;
3. By the fact that Nino 34 area sea surface temperatures have not increased significantly since ~1982, and corresponding air temperatures increased largely due to the dissipation of the cooling impact of two century-scale volcanoes – in 1982 (El Chichon) and 1991+ (Pinatubo);
4. By the fact that CO2 lags temperature by ~9 months in the modern data record, and the future cannot cause the past (in this space-time continuum).
Regards, Allan
__________________________________________________________________________
“EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS OF CROWDS”
Charles Mackay (1841)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds
Quotations
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
“Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder’s welcome.”
****************************************************************************
Don’t worry brother, you will most likely be dead within 50 years, but the planet will still be here.
But how will it survive without him?
I remember the twitter meltdown, it was accompanied by an idea of begging for money from people.
I told you he was depressed, and it’s not climate change that causes it, it is his addiction to doom porn
When people like Eric Holthaus root for the villain Thanos when they watch the Marvel movie, “Avengers:Infinity War”.
sorry, one , ‘when” should be deleted . When people like Eric Holthaus watch the Marvel movie, “Avengers:Infinity War”., they root for the villain Thanos.
I don’t know enough about Mr Holthaus to say one way or the other if he would root for Thanos, but I do agree that a number of the green “malthusan” types must wonder why all the Avengers are trying to stop Thanos from executing his obviously sensible (to them) solution to the overcrowding “problem”.