Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Climate scientists want to be “stewards of grief, to hold the hand of society as we enter the unknown space of the climate crisis“.
Scientists need to face both facts and feelings when dealing with the climate crisis
I was taught to use my head, not my heart. But acknowledging sadness at what is lost can help us safeguard the future
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Bearing witness to the demise or death of what we love has started to look an awful lot like the job description for an environmental scientist these days. Over dinner, my colleague Ola Olsson matter‑of‑factly summed up his career: “Half the wildlife in Africa has died on my watch.” He studied biodiversity because he loved animals and wanted to understand and protect them. Instead his career has turned into a decades-long funeral.
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My dispassionate training has not prepared me for the increasingly frequent emotional crises of climate change. What do I tell the student who chokes up in my office when she reads that 90% of the seagrasses she’s trying to design policies to protect are slated to be killed by warming before she retires? In such cases, facts are cold comfort. The skill I’ve had to cultivate on my own is to find the appropriate bedside manner as a doctor to a feverish planet; to try to go beyond probabilities and scenarios, to acknowledge what is important and grieve for what is being lost.
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It has taken me a long time to come to terms with my climate and ecological grief, but swimming through it is the only way forward. One role environmental scientists can play is to be “stewards of grief, to hold the hand of society as we enter the unknown space of the climate crisis,” as my friend Leehi Yona so beautifully wrote when the IPCC’s 1.5C report launched. As scientists, we have had much more time observing the decline of what we love. We are further down the line of where we all must get to as a society, facing hard truths and still finding ways to be kind and resilient, to do better going forward, to get through this together. We still have so much we love at stake that is worth fighting for.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/24/scientists-facts-feelings-climate-crisis-sadness
Whenever I read something like this I get this kind of yech feeling, like I’ve just received an unexpected and unwanted random hug from a stranger. You know, the quick look to see if they have any obvious indications of mental or physical illness, the quick check to make sure your wallet is still in your pocket.
Let us just say I’m not in a hurry to hold your hand and let you lead me, Kimberley.
Yes, of course. The windmills are killing all the birds, and the solar panels are taking up so much of the landscape that there is no more room for the 4 footed beasts.
From the article: “What do I tell the student who chokes up in my office when she reads that 90% of the seagrasses she’s trying to design policies to protect are slated to be killed by warming before she retires?”
You should tell her not to believe everything she reads. Sometimes falsehoods are presented as facts.
The truth is: All those scary stories about Human-caused Climate Change are science fiction. You and your students are being spooked by lies. Too bad you don’t have enough sense to figure this out for yourself. As a consequence, you suffer, and your students suffer.
You have been manipulated into believing something that isn’t true, or at least, there is no evidence for the claims, yet you drive yourself insane over it. Not healthy behavior.
and then later the other half died of irony
“Half the wildlife in Africa has died on my watch”
Thanks to hunting, poaching, civil wars, and most of all due to conflict with an expanding human population with its ever-expanding need to land to live on and grow food. And nothing to do with global warming.
But who is going to tell African people that they have less right to life, health, the pursuit of happiness etc. etc. than animals? The problem is discussed in some depth by Schellenberg in “Apocalypse Never” and also the even more hard-hitting “The Big Conservation Lie” by Mbaria and Ogada. To ‘have our cake and eat it too’ in respect of land-use, conservation, and human rights is going to be a very very challenging juggling act.
So much simpler to blame westerners and their SUVs.
What an idiot … land use changes created by subsistence farmers, the animals have been killed for food and ‘voodoo’ medicines … it is a poverty problem, nothing to do with climate.
Here’s a thought why don’t they get off their fat over paid ###### and do something about it,
https://www.fishsticks.co/ Standing there and doing nothing or writing e-mails hand wringing do squat for the problem, If they see a problem work out how to fix it.
My guess is she’s never been to Africa, anywhere in Africa.
How sad is Kimberly going to be if the misanthropes at Extinction Rebellion and the likes of Ted Turner and Jane Fonda have their way, and the planet is reduced to half a billion human beings? That’s about 14 out of every 15 people. To get a sense of the scale, look around at a group of fourteen of your closest friends. Now realize for you to remain, all of them have to die. Or we can just let loose a lethal virus, which will kill indiscriminately, as the XR people seem to want. That sounds like it’s going to be pretty sad to me. Or we could keep on living, driving to the beach (in Florida, of course), and eating tasty shrimp cocktails and oysters at a sunny bistro, and enjoying our Corn Pops cereal, because the extra CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere is going to help our food crops grow. Choose your poison carefully, Kimberly.
Hi moderators (and Anthony). I have a comment in moderation limbo in this thread. The text of my comment is displayed with a message in the upper right corner in orange text that advises: “Awaiting for approval.” First, but less importantly, the grammar of that message is atrocious. “Awaiting approval” would be much better. Secondly, and more importantly, if some word or phrase triggered the routing into moderation, could you possibly make that message into a hot link that highlights offending word or phase in the submitted message, or better yet, if that message is displayed, then highlight all text in the body of the message with a text block in orange quoting the rule(s) being tested. In such cases, one could simply hit the edit comment button, rewrite as necessary, and resubmit, or simply ignore the warning, and wait for approval if the violating words or phrase are critical to the point being made. That would be an amazingly awesome improvement to the WUWT commenting experience, and it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to code in a Java subroutine..
I really feel for Ola Ollsen losing half of Africa’s wildlife on his watch, but what about me? Half of the world’s people have disappeared on mine – based on 66 years alive & an average of 55,000,000 deaths a year.