Reposted from Dr. Judith Curry’s Climate Etc.
Posted on July 8, 2019 by curryja |
by Judith Curry
It’s getting worse.
About 5 years ago, I wrote two blog posts on climate scientists’ pre-traumatic stress syndrome:
- Pre-traumatic stress syndrome: climate trauma survival trips
- Pre-traumatic stress syndrome: climate scientists speak out
Mother Jones has a new article on the same topic It’s the end of the world as they know it: The distinct burden of being a climate scientist. The following scientists were interviewed: Kim Cobb, Priya Shukla, Peter Kalmus, Sarah Myhre, Jacquelyn Gill, Katharine Wilkinson, Eric Holthaus, David Grinspoon, Ken Caldeira.
Lots of ‘trauma,’ read the article to get a flavor. This sentence pretty much sums things up:
“There’s deep grief and anxiety for what’s being lost, followed by rage at continued political inaction, and finally hope that we can indeed solve this challenge. There are definitely tears and trembling voices.”
End of civilization?
The title of the article is: “It’s the end of the world as they know it.” Some selected quotes:
“I’m tired of processing this incredible and immense decline”
” . . . knows of a looming catastrophe but must struggle to function in a world that does not comprehend what is coming and, worse, largely ignores the warnings of those who do.”
“it’s deep grief—having eyes wide open to what is playing out in our world”
“I lose sleep over climate change almost every single night”
“Climate change is its own unique trauma. It has to do with human existence.”
“I have no child and I have one dog, and thank god he’ll be dead in 10 years.”
Soooo . . . have any of these scientists read the IPCC Reports? I’m not seeing this level of ‘alarm’ anywhere in the IPCC Reports? Where the heck does this ‘end of civilization’ stuff come from?
In a tweet about the article, Lucas Bergkamp asked:
“How can these scientists produce any reliable, objective data?”
Gotta wonder. Sarah Myhre states:
“I have anxiety exacerbated by the constant background of doom and gloom of science. It’s not stopping me from doing my work, but it’s an impediment.”
Apart from ‘impediments’, what about flat-out bias in research introduced by this extreme world view?
Hardiness
Not all climate scientists are similarly ‘afflicted.’ My previous blog post included statements from Suki Manabe and Gavin Schmidt, who were not afflicted in this way. The Mother Jones article includes statements from David Grinspoon, Ken Caldeira and Michael Mann, who also do not seem to be so ‘afflicted.’
“Caldeira offers a blunt comparison: “I had a girlfriend once who was a social worker who had to deal with abused children. She had to deal with real shit every day. Climate scientists have it easy.” And Kate Marvel, a climate scientist and science writer, went even further in a tweet in January: “In a world where people have to deal with racism, inequality, and resurgent fascism, the notion that climate science is uniquely depressing is…weird.”
In my earlier blog post, i discussed the concept of psychological hardiness, excerpts provided below:
<begin quote>
And also inform yourself about psychological hardiness (something I learned from days at U. Chicago and hanging out with grad students in Salvatore Maddi’s group). Excerpt from Wikipedia:
The coping style most commonly associated with hardiness is that of transformational coping, an optimistic style of coping that transforms stressful events into less stressful ones. At the cognitive level this involves setting the event into a broader perspective in which they do not seem so terrible after all. At the level of action, individuals high in hardiness are believed to react to stressful events by increasing their interaction with them, trying to turn them into an advantage and opportunity for growth, and in the process achieve some greater understanding.
The ‘pre-traumatic stress’ thing clicked a link in my mind to my old U. of Chicago pal Colonel Paul Bartone, a military psychologist and a member of the hardiness group. The following paper seems relevant: A Model for Soldier Psychological Adaptation in Peacekeeping Operations. I think these concepts are relevant for what is going on with Parmesan et al. Seems like skeptics are more hardy?
The psychology of all this is probably pretty interesting, and worthy of more investigation. But Jeff Kiehl is right – whining scientists aren’t going to help either the science or their ’cause.’
<end quote>
Mann seems peculiarly hardy in this sense: “But Mann, who has had to contend with death threats and campaigns to have him fired from Penn State, derives motivation from being in battle.”
Antidotes
This ‘affliction’ of climate scientists seems rather trendy in some sort of ‘woke’ sense. If you do not aspire to such trendiness, what might you do to overcome this affliction?
“Professionally coping with grief is part of the job training for doctors, caregivers, and those working in humanitarian or crisis situations. But for scientists?”
To figure out how these afflicted climate scientists can become more hardy, it is useful to speculate on the reasons for their ‘affliction.’
Ignorance may play an important role. Few of the scientists interviewed are experts on attribution. They seem to blame everything on manmade climate change, and are extrapolating future consequences that are much more dire and with higher confidence than than those from the IPCC. Clearly an issue for Greta, but one would hope that actual climate scientists would dig deeper and be more curious and objective.
JC antidote: Apart from blaming anything negative on manmade climate change, take a step back and assess how the planet and the human race are actually doing. Take a look at humanprogress.org, or follow them on twitter @HumanProgress. Global life expectancy is increasing, global poverty is way down, global agricultural productivity is way up, global child mortality is way down, the planet is greening, etc. Heck, even the corals are doing really well, following the 2016 El Nino.
A lot of this affliction seems to be about ‘ego’:
“I had to face the fact that there was a veritable tidal wave of people who don’t care about climate change and who put personal interest above the body of scientific information that I had contributed to.”
“his anger was driven by the fact that his expertise—his foresight—was not broadly recognized.”
JC antidote: Try reading some literature on history, philosophy and sociology of science – you will become more humble as a scientist and less likely to believe your own hype. Read Richard Feynman. Hang out at Climate Etc. Listen seriously to a serious skeptic.
Having your ego wrapped up in having your research influence policy (frustrated policy advocates), keeping ‘score’ in a personal war against skeptics, seeking fame, generating book sales and lecture fees and political influence, etc. can all come into play in influencing how a scientist reacts to the ‘threats’ of climate change. Scientists might get ‘upset’ if they don’t think they are sufficiently successful at the above. This is something else — not pre-traumatic stress syndrome.
Roger Pielke Jr tweets:
“The whole phenomena of climate scientists identifying evil enemies who have obstructed revolution, transformation, restructuring is not reality-based, but a reflection of power fantasies & a complete lack of understanding of how political and societal change actually happens.”
JC antidote: focus more on being a scientist than being a politician. You might know what you are doing as a scientist. You are very unlikely to be effective as a politician, and your political activism will contribute to the appearance bias in your scientific research.
The author should have included quotes around the word Scientists in the article’s title. No responsible scientists would treat their profession as a religion (rejection of all data conflicting with their beliefs, lashing out at people presenting differing opinions rather than refuting their statements with supporting evidence, falsifying data to support their beliefs, changing definitions of what their models say in mid-stream when data conflicts with the forecast).
I’m starting to take offense at folks like these being called “climate scientists” in particular, since their educational backgrounds often show little in the way of bona fide climate-related credentials.
Kim Cobb – Biology, Geology, Oceanography
Priya Shukla – Environmental Science and Management, Ecology
Peter Kalmus – Physics
Sarah Myhre – Marine Biology, Ecology
Jacquelyn Gill – Human Ecology, Paleoecology
Katharine Wilkinson – Religion, Geography & Environment
Eric Holthaus – Meteorology, Climate and Society, Geography and Development
David Grinspoon – Planetary Science
Ken Caldeira – Atmospheric Sciences
Camille Parmesan – Biological Sciences
Faith Kearns – Environmental Science, Geology, Political Science
Michael Mann – Math, Physics, Geology, Geophysics
Kate Marvel – Physics, Astronomy, Theoretical Physics
My advice to stressed-out “Climate Scientists” would be, simply, study the statistics of Natural Variation, and realize, actually, nothing at all unusual has happened, is happening, nor is likely to happen. And, don’t believe everything you read…
Michael Moon: “And, don’t believe everything you read…”
…and little of what they write.
The cure for Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder is for journalists to stop giving deranged pansies the appearance of being something more.
They’ll be jumping off tall buildings in droves along with the poley bears and a penguin tucked under each arm with the news-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/glacial-melting-in-antarctica-may-become-irreversible/ar-AAE4OuL
Should The Guardian be allowed to tip them over the edge like this or do they have a higher moral obligation to quash this? The great ethical dilemma of our times.
It’s the end of the world as they know it and I feel fine.
I lose sleep (though not every night because, priorities) over the ever increasing percentage of my already too heavy tax burden getting shoveled toward the “research” that these PTSS afflicted “scientists” perform.
I can understand their professional angst but not to the level of personal anxiety. When a new and potentially devastating theory is held by a scientist, skeptical attitudes will abound. It is the necessary fire that proves the theory nothing but dross, or shows it to be true gold. The scientific attitude should therefor be one of willingness to endure this necessary phase of new discoveries.
I know of this. I am writing a book with the running title, “Factitious Presentation: Birth to Munchausen “, that proposes a new syndrome with genetic beginnings and that can be behaviorally observed and possibly objectively measured and identified as early as Kindergarten. Trust me, I have been in the crosshairs of many for proposing such a theory. But that is the necessary struggles a paradigm shift must endure.
So these snowflakes need to get out of pull-ups and wear underwear. Plus, when has it become okay for scientists to have a potty mouth when speaking publicly?
Some things never change.
Concentrate on good science among the noise. Discovery is still a race albeit with more collaboration and teamwork on difficult projects. The intolerant enforcers of flawed models are forgotten and ignored eventually. The wait time varies though and the young professionals suffer the most and the older ones head to retirement with frustration. Survival of the fittest does win with the arrow of time while bravery involves shortening the wait time.
If they think the world is ending in spite of the fact that everything is getting better, it is not “the appearance of bias”.
It is clownish refusal to recognize that one’s fears are all imaginary.
One thing should be obvious to everyone: One side is correct, and the other side is wrong.
So, how to decide, if one has no actual knowledge of the facts, or the skills and ability to delve into those facts for clarity?
Well, one approach that seems logical is to look at which side keeps predicting stuff that does not happen.
Which side has really bad judgement about what effective strategies might be for eliminating CO2 production (conceding for the sake of argumentation that such a need exists)?
Which side alters data instead of modifying their hypothesis?
Which side ignores entire libraries of information about physical geography, and Earth history, and written and photographic historical accounts ,and archeology, and yadda yadda yadda, and instead focuses intently on a notion with mysteriously unobservable consequences?
And which side is part of a political philosophy that wants to fold all the ills of Man into an overarching theme that has for a solution the granting of all powers and all controls to it’s adherents?
One side behaves like con artists, grifters, and flim flam experts.
They refuse to address a very long list of problems with their idea, refuse to debate or even acknowledge a difference of opinion, and go out of their way to disparage and marginalize anyone, even on their own side, who offers any hint of criticism, or even a balanced view.
The insist on a revised version of the scientific method that rejects such standards as the ability to make predictions, and instead inserts such things as a corrupted “peer review” process, taking a vote but only counting “ayes”, and such logically fallacious forms of evidence as relying on the opinions of so-called experts (never mind that these are the experts who have a batting average of very close to .000 re validation of predictions). In other words, they have replaced the actual scientific method with the exact way of deciding what is what, that the scientific method replaced!
At the present time, we have an avalanche of media figures and politicians and activists bombarding the world with incessant and shrill alarmism. At the same time all moderation has left the pronouncements of these individuals and groups: Bad weather is now synonymous with “climate change”, and even one hot day in one isolated location is widely cited as proof positive of an ongoing worldwide crisis, even if no actual harm comes from it. But an extended period of record cold and frost in mid-Summer not even a week later, in the exact same spots, is completely ignored!
It is all hype, all the time, with nary a fact in sight.
And where are people like Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann while all this is going on?
While the inanity and exaggerations reach all time high levels, the tendency for actual scientists to speak up and call it out has gone from hesitant to non-existent.
The people who should be telling everyone that the idea of the world ending in 12 years, has no basis in science or even in rational discourse, are instead deafeningly silent.
Add it all up, and it is more clear than ever: This is not a science, it is a weaponized form of disinformation.
The proponents of it range from people who are surely lying, to those who are spectacularly duped, to those who are profiteers with no care for science or truth.
Scattered throughout are conniving politicians, “If-It-Bleeds-It-Leads” media hacks, gravy train bandwagon-hoppers of various descriptions, and several flavors and stripes of agenda driven ideologues.
Hard to say where the people mentioned as being PTSD-suffering insomniacs figure in to it all. Some are likely miseducated, some not very bright but high in what cognitive scientists call conscientiousness, and some just incredibly neurotic.
All should ask themselves how it can be that, while the present has never been better, their assessment for the immediate future is unprecedented doom?
All of this would be terribly interesting but ultimately unimportant if it was like any other disagreement in science.
Instead, the fact is the stakes in this are very high, as high as they could be, and it has nothing at all to do with science.
This is a con, and what is sought is power and money, the stakes are human lives, at risk is control of our own lives and our very freedoms, and the endgame of the loudest voices is global socialism.
Thank you, McGinley, for laying out the sad facts in this way.
Regarding CO2, “eliminating CO2 production (conceding for the sake of argumentation that such a need exists)?” I don’t concede for a minute. Thinking people with a minimal understanding of statistical inference should already be aware that there is NO EVIDENCE indicating that CO2 is a driver of any aspect of climate other than the benign effect of greening the planet, however slightly. It is only a highly debatable theory which depends on a host of undemonstrated improbables, put forth by a now long-dead Harvard professor who renounced the theory virtually on his death bed. (A death bed confession?) Of course, it is always called “CARBON”, you know, that nasty black black stuff that darkens the sky and gives us black lung disease, London fogs, etc.
The human need to paint the past beautiful and the impending future terrible, is deeply ingrained. It goes back at least as far as Hesiod and his descending stages of man. The modern version, with a false veneer of mathematics, starts with Malthus, but in my lifetime the king of doom has been Paul Ehrlich, an insect specialist who gained fame and fortune in the 1960’s by predicting the collapse of civilization through overpopulation. His laughable predictions were taken very seriously by many people who imagined themselves well-informed, but when none came true, he produced more predictions in more books which sold in more millions, and he smirked over the pile as one after another proved false. He was followed by the illustrious “Club of Rome” whose mathematical models absolutely proved that industrial and economic growth were “unsustainable” since we would rapidly run out of natural resources while defiling the planet. They sold millions of copies of their “definitive” final report, and it was worshipfully translated into dozens of different languages. How wise they were!! How noble, saving the earth for us. But, of course, none of it came true; NONE OF IT!
In the late 20th century, we had “catastrophic global warming,” more currently and cynically reworded as “climate change,” (because the warming stopped.) The utter banality of this empty slogan escapes notice completely. Never has there been such a universally accepted slogan containing so little meaning, now sanctified by an international treaty, no less.
The emperor has NO CLOTHES, NO CLOTHES, you idiots. Can’t you see?
Oh, I agree with you.
But the people who are sure that CO2 is going to make the planet unlivable, or so they say, are advocating for policy “solutions”, that are proving not to lower CO2 production much, if at all.
If they really believe it, this is completely inexplicable.
In fact, it is likely impossible for anyone who really thinks what they are saying about doomsday, and has the ability to think critically, to ignore that wind turbines are no solution at all.
If they get what they want, everyone agrees with them some magical day, and we do what they say is the fix for it all, the result will be that CO2 is barely changed!
But all the birds will be dead.
The underlying point is easy to summarize: These people are not even internally consistent in the things they say.
If I can reassure them, they are not alone :
Traumatic stress or crisis is the pathway for how we got income taxes, sales taxes, and now carbon taxes. War and depression were the pretexts for those earlier permanent tax enactments with penalty and interest if you are late in paying them and now in the modern era we need only modeled crisis to be the pretext. Money and power have not changed much though.
In addition to humanprogress.org, a good read is Factfulness-Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling. He made the interesting observation that “Almost every activist I have ever met, whether deliberately or, more likely, unknowingly, exaggerates the problem to which they have dedicated themselves.”
Is China stressing over CC? India? How about Russia? Any developing country other than those who feel ‘reparations’ are due? CC is a fake catastrophe well suited to intellectual masturbation and supported by Western media. I think everyone know who’s propagating the hysteria and for what reason yet “wealth redistribution” remains the elephant in the room of CC.
It is not that they are scientists, which they mostly are not. Eric Holthaus is certainly not in any way a scientists, nor does he claim to be to his credit.
It is that they are all Liberal-Progressives.
Progressives have a form of mental illness that leads to delusions and heightened anxiety for irrational, baseless reasons….
in the Old Parlance of psychology… they are easily prone to phobias. Nothing more.
They just need to get on some good psych meds (Xanax, etc) and stay on them… especially after Trump gets re-elected to control their TDS symptoms.
Even fake movie star scientists know that real scientists should not be shocked by new discoveries that shatter paradigms.
” Eric Holthaus is certainly not in any way a scientists, nor does he claim to be to his credit.”
What do you call a meteorologist? He certainly claims to be that.
btw, here’s his latest piece of yellow journalism in the WaPo.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/09/trumps-environmental-leadership-is-sending-us-climate-disaster/
And more at yellow ‘science’ at https://phys.org/news/2019-07-breaching-carbon-threshold-mass-extinction.html
Alarmist bunk!
“Mother Jones has a new article on the same topic It’s the end of the world as they know it: The distinct burden of being a climate scientist. The following scientists were interviewed: Kim Cobb, Priya Shukla, Peter Kalmus, Sarah Myhre, Jacquelyn Gill, Katharine Wilkinson, Eric Holthaus, David Grinspoon, Ken Caldeira.”
The prejudiced polling the incompetent.
Similar to the 97% Concensus simply poll those who will skew the desired results in the required direction
The ‘victims’ of psychological stress among alarmist climate scientists were already predisposed by their constitutions. They are a remarkably unprepossessing lot as scholars and thinkers. The term “scientist” has never been so bandied about by the scientists themselves. It used to be more often used by ordinary folk in awe of them.
To me, the real victims of all this unnecessary fear are school children and people indoctrinated by this phantom science. This abuse should be punished
Commie Bob sums it up perfectly, Universities have largely ceased to be a outstanding par tis of the countries education system, plus its easy to cheat to get that oh so important bit of paper.
They need to get rid of the soft courses and stick to the hard ones such as engineering.
No I am not anti Uni because I never went to one, but my daughter did, she was working at a part time job and did it the hard way as a mature aged student.
Lets go back to what amounts to a form of apprentices, to actually learn on the job. It worked in the past.
MJE VK5ELL
The former Dean of Engineering at the University of Waterloo started out as an apprentice. He seemed to be proud of the fact and seemed to remember his apprenticeship fondly.
Around here, a four year engineering graduate isn’t very productive at the beginning of her career. A couple of years experience is necessary for her to become useful. Starting engineers in apprentice positions would go a long way to fixing that problem.
PreTSD? More like Cassandra Syndrome.
With the exception that Cassandra’s predictions were correct.
How about just plain garden variety neurosis.
and
If you believe crap, it takes a toll. I’m guessing that it afflicts those who Talib calls ‘intellectual yet idiot’.
These people have generated their own mental cage not too dissimilar to the ‘Catch-22’ paradigm but now find that they are stressed by the guilt of building such a big lie.
Some realize that like ‘One that Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest’ they are stuck in this insane (modeled) world, unable to escape, caught by their own lies and stupidity. The UN’s nurse Ratched is ably assisted by the deceitful strong-arm tactics of the loudmouths of cAGW (Mann, Trenberth, Jones, Hensen, etc., and the complaint MSM)
Climate Science™, or ‘CO2’s Flying Cuckoos Nest of Catch-22’
Oh ye of little faith. Won’t you ever believe in rocket science?
‘Alex Robel, an assistant professor at the US Georgia Institute of Technology and the study’s leader, said if instability was triggered, the ice sheet could be lost in the space of 150 years, even if temperatures stopped rising. “It will keep going by itself and that’s the worry,” he said.
Modelling simulations suggested extensive ice loss would start in 600 years but the researchers said it could occur sooner depending on the pace of global heating and nature of the instability.
Hélène Seroussi, a jet propulsion laboratory scientist at Nasa, said: “It could happen in the next 200 to 600 years. It depends on the bedrock topography under the ice, and we don’t know it in great detail yet.”’…..
We’re all doomed, doomed I tell yah!
‘The researchers found a precise estimate of how much ice the glacier would shed in the next 50 to 800 years was not possible due to unpredictable climate fluctuations and data limitations. However, 500 simulations of different scenarios pointed to it losing stability. This increased uncertainty about future sea level rise but made the worst-case scenarios more likely.
A complete loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet would be expected to increase global sea levels by about five metres (16ft), causing coastal cities around the world to become submerged.’
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/glacial-melting-in-antarctica-may-become-irreversible/ar-AAE4OuL
FIVE HUNDRED stimulations! Yikes!!!
An average of 500 incorrect answers is not equal to a correct answer
Yes Bryan A,
but out of those 500 incorrect answers some may be statistically close-ish to give the whole darn shooting match a highish confidence level to them almost understanding what they’re trying to research.
Of course knowing which of the 500 incorrect answers are closest is the known unknown due to unknown unknowns.
And with that we can confidently say that the model runs are useful. 🙄
“An average of 500 incorrect answers is not equal to a correct answer”
Well with all that doomsday uncertainty you’re always left wondering if 500 compooter stimulations is really enough or whether 600, 700…? would help get to the bottom of it all. Still when you’re on to something really big with doomsday stuff like this you have to cut it short somewhere to get the message out there and leave the minions to fill in the gaps and minor details.
JimW note: John Kasich sent out a note last week deploring our backing out of commitments to work together to combat climate change, and to request funding. I replied:
Dear John,
I could disagree more, but suffice it to say that the science does not support any expenditure on CO2 mitigation.
And not for the thoroughly practical reason that there will never be enough international agreement and cooperation to accomplish that.
Rather, it’s because the natural experiment has been done, in 1929-1931, when human global CO2 production declined 30% and atmospheric CO2 did not change its languid rise. Not surprising, since our contribution to the annual production is only 4%. Temperature kept rising for the next 10 years. And then declined during the WWII and post-war reconstruction years, when a good deal of CO2 was produced. This slight decline produced alarms about the oncoming Ice Age – see the covers of Newsweek and Time and Science News in the early 70s.
The science does not support mitigation even theoretically, since CO2 produces half its GHG effect in the first 20 ppm and, as Arrhenius noted, declines exponentially after that. We are in the fifth half-life of that decline, which means that the next doubling to 800ppm will add less than 2% to CO2’s effect. We know that global temperature did not “run away” at previous levels of 2,000, and 4,000, and 8,000 ppm. We know that no temperature reversal for the last 550 million years has ever been preceded by a CO2 change.
So CO2 is not in control of climate, and we are not in control of CO2.
On 6/2/2019 9:05 AM, John Kasich wrote:
work with our allies to heal the damage done to our planet.
But, please, not by CO2 mitigation.
The fact that mankind is having a measurable impact on Earth’s climate is undeniable by modern science.
Very true, but not because of nice clean CO2 which warms us and cools us and feeds us. It would be because of paving and plastics and clear-cutting and the like. Particulates in the air are bad, but CO2 isn’t. Submarines don’t even take any countermeasures until CO2 reaches 8,000 ppm.
Of course, we don’t have as much effect on the climate as beetles and termites, but still…
Best wishes,