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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Maybe his conscience is getting him down and he can’t cope with the poverty he and his fellow scamsters are causing.
Climate change is going to happen – it always has and it always will. Losing sleep over it is like losing sleep over breathing. This man is deeply disturbed.
This represents psychological abuse by AGW alarmists. They deliberately turn up catastropist hyperbole for political ends. Whether they believe it themselves is a moot point – however their followers and believers can be made to endure serious anxiety and depression, and neurotic stress. For the movement’s political goals this just represents acceptable collateral damage. But it’s real people suffering real hurt for the sake of a political movement.
As a teenager I was told about CO2 global warming by some street activists in the UK and for a while believed the narrative. I remember at that time feeling anxiety and apprehension about global warming. I would look at the exhaust coming out of a line of cars on the road with a sense is of mild panic as to the harm being done to the planet.
It is already becoming clear in the scientific mainstream, not only the skeptic margins, that the most lurid doom prophecies about melting Himalayas, disappearing ice caps and coastal flooding are scientifically flawed gross exaggerations. Not to mention Paul Erlich-esqe comically erroneous predictions of eco-catastrophe. Equally pernicious is the energetic concealment and denyal of the incontrovertible benefits to plants and the biosphere of rising CO2. All of this together amounts to a campaign of dystopian misinformation and psychological abuse, for political gain.
Yikes! Look in the mirror and tell us if you see any similarities to Ted Kaczynski.
Someone needs to see a psychiatrist.
Ivan.
I read some of these out to the missus – she says “you guys are just mean…” 😀
We are not “mean”, MarkMcD, we are just sick and tired of overblown ignorance, which means using kindness to forgive, empathize, or nurture further ignorance would be really “mean” to the world.
How come not one person has pointed out the obvious here?
Plants cannot exist without CO2. ALL LIFE FORMS ARE CARBON-BASED. (DEAL WITH IT, ERIC!) If there is not enough CO2 in the atmosphere to support plant life, then plant life, which absorbs CO2 and H20 and releases water vapor and O2 (which animals – that’s US – need) will die off. The Atmosphere will cease to be viable and all lifeforms will die off.
Plants and animals are in a symbiotic relationship with each other. Have been for gazillions of years.
How hard is that to figure out? That’s basic biology.
Someone go explain this to Eric. I’d bet the only plants he has are the kind you buy at the hobby stores, with silk-screensd leaves and wires embedded to make them curve just so.
I was going to suggest a long holiday Eric but you know how it is-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/travel/news/carbon-footprint-of-global-tourism-significantly-underestimated-study/ar-AAxehyK
Stick with the climate agoraphobics and save us all.
Wow, you mean some people actually believe it is for real?
Eric, you sound like me about six years ago. I was always worried about carbon dioxide and what it could do to us, so, being a scientist (Earth systems science), I finally took the obvious step and delved deeply into the matter. As a result, from thinking that carbon “pollution” was the ultimate threat facing mankind, I’ve come to realize that the ultimate threat facing mankind is really irrational fear. My impartial studies over the last five years have reassured me that carbon dioxide does not, and can not, cause global warming. Now I realize that the ultimate challenge is getting people to realize this in the face of the barrage of fear-driven propaganda that appears to be coming from reputable sources, in many cases from credible climate scientists who have committed the unforgivable sin of believing a scientific conclusion without checking out the actual evidence.
Rising atmospheric CO2 is a non-problem, and I’ve written extensively about why this is so, but getting anything published that has this contrarian message is like herding cats. The best I can offer you, therefore, is a careful reading of my book, “In Praise Of Carbon” on amazon.com, which encapsulates my research and conclusions as to why carbon dioxide can not and does not function as a greenhouse gas in the Earth environment. I could go into detail here, but it’s really best to get the book (which has an inexpensive electronic version as well as a softcover), in which I carefully explain everything.
“I finally took the obvious step and delved deeply into the matter.”
I think all skeptics have because they have enquiring scientific minds and when you do start looking at the evidence you can’t help delving into it more and more expecting to come across the definitive hard evidence you’re expecting. But the harder you look you don’t find any but rather keep bumping into more and more contrarian evidence that CO2 can’t be the big bogey so many have been claiming it to be. At some stage there’s a light bulb moment that you’ve been had with political séance and not real science at all and you’re gobsmacked that so many supposedly intelligent people have swallowed it all.
When you try and elaborate what you’ve found to others in your circle you quickly work out most of them don’t have a clue about any of the evidence for or against. They just believe the meme they’ve been told over and over again and with many of them you can tell it’s an emotional response and no further correspondence will be entered into. The only saving grace is although they pay lip service to the mantra they’re not going to put themselves out or make scarifices doing anything about it as that’s for all the experts to take care of somehow. That’s the bit that’s got the likes of Eric in a complete spin.
In his old age, if he realizes that he’s been alarmed for no reason, and that all the mental anguish was wasted imagination, he’ll feel a lot worse. But I suspect that internal rationalization mechanisms will prevent that. No matter what evidence over the next 30 years, he’ll never give up his views. He’s too much all-in.
I pity this poor fellow. Sadly he’s going down the same path as the Heavens Gate bunch, except he wants the rest of us to commit suicide (via elimination of reliable power sources) to satisfy his warped perception of reality. This man belongs in a mental asylum.
He started his career in “Climate Journalism” in 1973? (328ppm, 20% lower than today) He wasn’t even born until 1981. WTF?
Global carbon emissions being 20% higher, not CO2 concentration.
No idea if that makes it any better.
I lose sleep when the effing winter won’t end like it did earlier this year. What an idiot this dude is. I am glad he is in despair. An illogical pseudo scientist like him deserve it.
And I am a meteorologist too…. good grief this idiot is a piece of work.
“Yet global carbon emissions are more than 20 percent higher now than when I started work as a climate journalist”
and all the bad things predicted back than have failed to come to pass, that right there should be your wakeup call, Eric
Are there still people who do not think the earth is warming? Or are you just pretending that the additional CO2 will not warm the earth?
Just trying to get a fix on what people will believe based on bad science.
I know I shouldn’t feed the trolls….
Scott, The Earth has been warming (quite naturally) since the little ice age ended. CO2 is a very minor part of the atmospheric equation, and man’s contribution a minor part of the CO2. Sorry to break it to you but CAGW is bunk, this is seen with every failed prediction (and every contradictory prediction). How’s that ice free arctic going for you? You don’t know what snow is, right?
Step back and look at the big picture for a moment. You want somehow to change how the the solar system operates to mitigate the effects of climate change on earth? Do you really believe that mere mortals can change the solar system? Life has been evolving on earth for 3.8 million years quite successfully and will continue most likely for a few more million years, at least. Take a break and enjoy life.