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.”
There is no solution; so here’s a gun – and the whiskey. Get on with it man.
Tony, another sicko.
I can sympathize with Mr. Holthaus. It’s no fun being anxious and depressed, but on the bright side, it usually means that you don’t have anything more serious to worry about. For example, just suppose (heaven forbid) that he went to the doctor because he had a nagging pain somewhere, and after a careful diagnosis, it was discovered that he had a fatal illness and only had one month to live. Do you think he could put that fact out of his mind and continue worrying about the planet? Not likely! The planet worrying would quickly take second place at best and the entire worrying apparatus would be requisitioned to deal with the TRULY existential threat posed by the illness.
So I say to Mr. Holthaus with all due respect, don’t worry, be happy. Your beloved planet has withstood far greater threats to its existence than a little CO2. The occasional collision with a massive meteorite comes to mind. And don’t forget that said planet has a rather unpleasant rendez vous at some future date with its dying parent star which will result in a tad more heat than that generated by a little increase in CO2 levels.
yeah, Dave, there seems to be a few of them on this thread. fortunately they are a fringe minority.
John, I agree: Intellectual debate is great; wishing harm on others is sick.
Church folks who read nothing but St. James from their bibles can end up in the same state of guilt and despair. Same as those who only see the alarmist view, there’s missing information because they’ve chosen to look through a crack in the fence instead of opening the gate. For them it’s all about religious belief in modern prophecy, based on authority, consensus and supercomputer modeling, all passed off as “evidence”.
They can’t nail down climate sensitivity or CO2’s actual persistence in the atmosphere, but you need to believe and cower to the odious scenarios of worse-than-we-thought predictions.
The curious thing to me is the paucity of facts in his great meltdown. The only thing that he points to is that the CO2 concentration has gone from 0.03% to 0.04% …
w.
Willis, I think he is calling to the circular thinking that goes with “the belief”.
Those facts include absolutely no detrimental change in tornadoes, hurricanes, cyclones, floods, droughts, etc. in the last 100-plus years, Willis. The minor warming from the Little Ice Age and some associated puny increases in rainfall are no reason for panic.
There is no argument that some features of the global biosphere have shown some minor changes associated with the benevolent increase in temperatures. Additionally, CO2 fertilization is an undisputed fact.
Combine IPCC AR5 CMIP5 hot climate models with the wildly fanciful RCP8.5, throw in activist speculation and you get CAGW. Until he realizes that, Eric will continue to have problems.
Ha-ha-ha. So funny. The Chinese played the West for the brainwashed saps and suckers they are. But as with the trade war, don’t blame the Chinese. They were perfectly transparent about building hundreds of coal plants (while shutting a few cola plants in dense urban areas)… They SAID their emissions would rise until at least 2030. But most of the saps chose to ignore the reality while Xi proclaimed he was a Climate leader simply to encourage the West to euthanize themselves. And they are! (Especially in California).
However it seems the Germans have learned their lesson and and climbing down from the Energiewende fiasco… though they will be really screwed if they continue closing their nuke power plants (We can all have a good laugh when the merde hits the fan and the German Greens and their enablers like Merkel get what’s coming to them)
The Aussies were done in by shutting down a bunch of effective plants too, in favor of wind and solar. Now they’re screwed. Unreal.
Sorry Eric…your deep despair isn’t about climate. There is something else in your life that you don’t want to confront that is driving you down a black hole. Man up and deal with the other things and then you won’t feel like it is the end times.
If you are a left-wing person, you will jump on the global warming band-wagon as an expression of how left you are. It is a statement.
Maybe you need to express this so fully, that the climate change religion overwhelms your normal logical self.
Eric is just expressing to everyone that he is such a virtuous left-wing person. I mean “he really cares”. He cares so much that he has put himself into clinical depression.
You know, there are some people that you can help and there are people who you don’t waste your time on. Holthaus is fully committed to being one of those that can’t be helped.
Cry on the phone from an airport to your wife. Sorry, she eventually figured this out as well.
Eric,
I strongly recommend that you try the following exercise:
* Seat yourself in a comfortable position on the floor or on a grassy lawn or other flat surface.
* Sit up straight and tall, close your eyes, and slowly, consistently breath in deeply for twenty seconds.
* Now hold that breath for twenty seconds.
* With lips pressed together, slowly blow out the breath for twenty seconds, pushing out every last bit of it at the end with a coughing-like maneuver.
* Repeat this sequence at least three times.
* Now reflect on this process — how the holding of your breath retains a bit more CO2 than the body usually does in normal breathing, and yet the alkalizing effect of breath-holding resulting in the CO2 build up is actually a healthy thing, enabling you to regulate your breathing and metabolism better.
* Continue your mental reflection by asking yourself, “Can Nature really be so contradictory as to allow the process of retaining CO2 in the body to be healthy, while allowing a relatively small build up of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere to be catastrophic for the body of Earth ?”
* Continue by asking yourself, “Can Nature be so cruel as to allow plants and all life as we know it to benefit from CO2, and yet, when humans produce CO2 with fossil-fuel civilization, it punishes the very life that is dependent on this molecule by making our own human additions catastrophic for climate ?”
* Each morning that you awaken, go through the above exercise, … religiously. Never skip a day.
If you are performing the exercise correctly and consistently, then you should eventually feel your anxiety subside. You will awaken to a new you, … a new outlook, … a new view of CO2 and climate change that will provide you with many years of enhanced life.
Ok. Read a lot if comments, but I think there may be more depth to this guy’s illness than many may suspect.
His mission is to be the Paul Revere of climate change, alerting every middlesex, village, and farm. That is his reason for getting out of bed each morning. Problem is, he is being ignored. That gives rise to his fear of failure, but it could be overcome if he were more effective – and a little supporting help from the weather would greatly help.
But the lack of seeing any real climate change gives rise to a deeper threat: what if climate change isn’t happening? His whole reason for living, his whole life up to this point, has been one, huge, waste of time and emotion. Not only are the villagers ignoring him, the British aren’t even coming.
If (when) AGW turns out not to be a real threat, he won’t be depressed, he’ll be suicidal.
Worse still, the British don’t even exist! (Which at this current time, is nearly correct).
Yeah that dude needs a lot of help. To go batshit crazy over a few parts per million is…..batshit crazy.
Eloquent declaration of the known facts, Jeff!
If what he says about himself is true, he is a clear danger to himself and others. I hope he doesn’t own any guns.
In the past we tended to think that people with crazy thoughts were otherwise normal people thinking crazy stuff. Now we think they are biochemically imbalanced. So, maybe drugs might help him.
For example, he is worried about the climate future and his children. How about worrying about the inevitable physical decay of his body and the bodies of his children in just a few decades before they all are reduced to clay. I guess that’s OK because its normal. The fact that he ignores that danger and obsesses about a hypothetical danger is evidence of a mental disorder, IMHO.
I can’t sleep at night worrying that we will never return to the warmth and plenty experienced during the Holocene Climatic Optimum.
At least he recognizes he has a problem. Perhaps he’ll also recognize that his problem isn’t climate change or its effects.
Hell, I made a comment a couple of days ago about hurricanes getting ‘confused’ and I never lost a minute of sleep. A hurricane may now need treatment due to my comment. Clowns and hurricanes in a rubber room? Imagine that!
If he wasn’t fixated on this it’d be something different. It’s ok Eric that your life may have no impact, or meaning. You are fortunate, I suppose, in that you won’t have to switch up your bogie man the rest of your life because CO2 marches on. It come out of your mouth, cars all around you spew it and it seeps under your doors.
CO2 never sleeps.
I have a cure, Switch to being a “climate skeptic” by looking at the actual data. He has been reaching out to the wrong scientists…then join the discussions here on WUWT.
Maybe there are a few converts on here that could give him some sound advice.
I see that this was published on “Greenpeace”. Perhaps he should talk to Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, and is now a CO2 enthusiast/promoter…
I am such a convert, and I did give my advice.
Now ponder this: Healing stones that a lot of health-mined, Earth-loving people use to “connect” with the Earth are mined, aren’t they?, … using fossil-fuel-powered machinery?, … transported to facilities, packaged, boxed, and sold, using the energy of fossil-fuel-powered civilization?
In fact, the comfort level that enables a person to be worried about a minute fraction of a minute fraction of gas molecules is itself based on fossil-fuel-powered civilization !
So, Eric, in addition to the daily breathing exercises and mental exercises that I previously described, meditate, NOT on chakra diagrams. but on THIS diagram:
… and chant as follows:
C Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 2ooooooooooooooooo
But..but.. you’re just a meteorologist, not a real climate scientist. Isn’t that the stock answer? Hope you feel better now.
It seems his family who are not meteorologists are more intelligent than he is if they get into arguments about global warming. He has the meterologist training but cant see the forest because of the trees. He needs to to reevaluate his whole understanding of climate and start all over again by looking at the data, BUT not the fake data coming out of NASA and NOAA. .
I’d love to see him debate a meteorologist of, say, Joe Bastardi’s ilk. I strongly suspect that he could not hold Joe’s borometer.
I think the only stress and anguish this guy feels is the fear that his Funding will be stripped when the Climate Scam gravy train comes shuddering to a halt…. I’m pretty sure that’s what his Nightmares are about.
If it were not CO2 greenhouse warming it would have been some other religion, or some other messianic doom obsession, with him playing persecuted martyr, who ‘saves’ the planet, because he’s more of everything, especially brains, and just cares soooo much …
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LQhX8PbNUWI
@ur momisugly E Holthaus …try some marijuana tea. It is the greatest sleep aid on the market. No high to it, it just relaxes you, and you wake up fresh as compared to the garbage medications off of the shelf.. Also a great muscle pain tonic, and aching back cure.
If climate change really is the most important issue in the world to this guy, above his wife and family, he has a severely twisted sense of priorities. I guess if you have spent your adult life trying to convince the world that CO2 is a boogieman that is going to kill us all, it might become hard not to internalize your own propaganda.
It could be that Holthaus had a traumatic experience with CO2 when he was a child. Perhaps he froze his fingers playing with a chunk of dry ice. Or maybe a bully at school shook his soda when he wasn’t looking and he sprayed himself. Having gone through such trauma, it’s easy to see why he can’t sleep knowing there’s a dangerous CO2 boogieman hiding in his closet, under his bed, or in the deep oceans just waiting to pounce. And to top it off, that boogieman is now 20% bigger than he was when you first imagined him years ago.
Just sayin, from those eyes…..
It’s some small consolation to know guys who’ve been trying to scare us into poverty over, much ado about nothing, are living in hell. There is some justice after all.
Good. Tire the enemy until they don’t have the strength to corece us all.
Besides global warming, the other discipline of science that fascinates me is diet and its effect on our health, both physical and mental. I feel bad for Eric, his experience can’t be any picnic. My suggestion to him would be to ditch the carbs (in particular wheat) and load up on protein and fat instead. I can’t tell you how many people report improved wellbeing with this protocol.