gordo
2019-03-07 20:26:39 UTC
The Other Kind of Climate Denialism
he Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wellss new book about how
climate change will affect human life, begins, It is worse, much
worse, than you think. In superhot cities, roads will melt and train
tracks will buckle. At five degrees of warming, much of the planet
would be in constant drought. With just six metres of sea-level
risean optimistic projectionland where three hundred and
seventy-five million people currently live will be underwater. Some of
the apocalyptic stories arent from the future but our recent past: in
the Paradise Camp Fire of late 2018, people fleeing the flames found
themselves sprinting past exploding cars, their sneakers melting to
the asphalt as they ran.
To anyone who has been paying attention, the broad strokes of The
Uninhabitable Earth come as no surprise. We are racing towardin fact
have already enteredan era of water shortage, wildfire, sea-level
rise, and extreme weather. To read the book is to ask hard questions
about ones own future. When will the city where I live be flooded?
Where should I live when it does? Where will my future children live?
Should I have children at all?
Yet Wallace-Wells has also stressed that there is no place for
fatalism. In an interview with NPR, he said that every inch of
warming makes a differencewe cannot stop the process of warming
altogether, but we can control whether climate change yields a future
that is apocalyptic or instead merely grim. Several years ago, I
asked the climate activist and writer Bill McKibben how he was able to
keep from falling into depression, given how much time he devotes to
thinking about climate change. He answered that fighting is the
keyits only despairing if you think that you cant take on the
problem. Its the greatest fight in human history, one whose outcome
will reverberate for geologic time, and it has to happen right now,
he said.
In 2008 and 2009, the American Psychological Association put together
a task force to examine the relationship between psychology and
climate change. It found that, although people said that climate
change was important, they did not feel a sense of urgency. The task
force identified several mental barriers that contributed to this
blasé stance. People were uncertain about climate change, mistrustful
of the science, or denied that it was related to human activity. They
tended to minimize the risks and believe that there was plenty of time
to make changes before the real impacts were felt. Just ten years
later, these attitudes about climate feel like ancient relics. But two
key factors, which the task force identified as keeping people from
taking action, have stood the test of time: one was habit, and the
other was lack of control. Ingrained behaviors are extremely
resistant to permanent change, the group stated. People believe
their actions would be too small to make a difference and choose to do
nothing.
Wallace-Wells hits this note in his book, too, writing, We seem most
comfortable adopting a learned posture of powerlessness. As
uncertainty and denial about climate have diminished, they have been
replaced by similarly paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, and
resignation. As we begin to live through the massive dangers imparted
by climate change, as one psychologist put it to me, We are in
psychological terrain, whether we like it or not.
John Fraser is a conservation psychologist who has studied burnout and
trauma among people doing environmental work. We have to move beyond
terrorizing people with disaster stories, he told me. Responses to
climate change are often discussed as a spectrum, with denial and
disengagement at one end and intense alarm on the other. We are
getting more alarmed. In 2009, a Yale and George Mason study grouped
Americans responses to climate into six categories: alarmed,
concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive. In 2009,
eighteen per cent were alarmed; in 2018, that number had risen to
twenty-nine per cent.
Fraser wants people to feel not alarmed but activated, and he takes a
relentlessly positive, solutions-oriented attitude. We got trains all
the way across America in a few years, and people on the moon in a few
years, he said. And ideas for climate moonshots abound:
negative-carbon-emission plants are prohibitively expensive, but they
do exist; some advocate for reviving nuclear power; proponents of a
Green New Deal call for ending fossil-fuel extraction and subsidies,
and radically expanding public transportation. In Silicon Valley,
ideas are emerging that rely less on politics than on technology, like
flooding some deserts to grow carbon-sucking algae beds, or using
electrochemistry to get rocks to absorb carbon from the air. Fraser
believes that the most productive way to communicate about
environmental problems is to emphasize the positive solutions that
exist. What we need to promote is hope, he said. The first step to
a healthy response is feeling that the problem is solvable.
Is it appropriate to feel terrified? No, Fraser said. Because you
just shut down.
Margaret Klein Salamon, who trained as a clinical psychologist before
founding a climate-advocacy organization, takes the opposite view. She
doesnt see fear as paralyzing but as a necessary response that
activates people to recognize danger and take action. Whats more,
given the state of the atmosphere, she argues that acute fear is
rational. Its important to feel afraid of things that will kill
usthat is healthy and good, she said. She believes that reckoning
with the scope of the emergency is required, both to activate
responsible behavior and to reap the mental-health benefits of living
in climate truth. Salamon, who grew up in a family of psychoanalysts
and considers therapy to be something of a family business, is
writing Transform Yourself with Climate Truth, a self-help book on
the subject.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-other-kind-of-climate-denialism
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he Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wellss new book about how
climate change will affect human life, begins, It is worse, much
worse, than you think. In superhot cities, roads will melt and train
tracks will buckle. At five degrees of warming, much of the planet
would be in constant drought. With just six metres of sea-level
risean optimistic projectionland where three hundred and
seventy-five million people currently live will be underwater. Some of
the apocalyptic stories arent from the future but our recent past: in
the Paradise Camp Fire of late 2018, people fleeing the flames found
themselves sprinting past exploding cars, their sneakers melting to
the asphalt as they ran.
To anyone who has been paying attention, the broad strokes of The
Uninhabitable Earth come as no surprise. We are racing towardin fact
have already enteredan era of water shortage, wildfire, sea-level
rise, and extreme weather. To read the book is to ask hard questions
about ones own future. When will the city where I live be flooded?
Where should I live when it does? Where will my future children live?
Should I have children at all?
Yet Wallace-Wells has also stressed that there is no place for
fatalism. In an interview with NPR, he said that every inch of
warming makes a differencewe cannot stop the process of warming
altogether, but we can control whether climate change yields a future
that is apocalyptic or instead merely grim. Several years ago, I
asked the climate activist and writer Bill McKibben how he was able to
keep from falling into depression, given how much time he devotes to
thinking about climate change. He answered that fighting is the
keyits only despairing if you think that you cant take on the
problem. Its the greatest fight in human history, one whose outcome
will reverberate for geologic time, and it has to happen right now,
he said.
In 2008 and 2009, the American Psychological Association put together
a task force to examine the relationship between psychology and
climate change. It found that, although people said that climate
change was important, they did not feel a sense of urgency. The task
force identified several mental barriers that contributed to this
blasé stance. People were uncertain about climate change, mistrustful
of the science, or denied that it was related to human activity. They
tended to minimize the risks and believe that there was plenty of time
to make changes before the real impacts were felt. Just ten years
later, these attitudes about climate feel like ancient relics. But two
key factors, which the task force identified as keeping people from
taking action, have stood the test of time: one was habit, and the
other was lack of control. Ingrained behaviors are extremely
resistant to permanent change, the group stated. People believe
their actions would be too small to make a difference and choose to do
nothing.
Wallace-Wells hits this note in his book, too, writing, We seem most
comfortable adopting a learned posture of powerlessness. As
uncertainty and denial about climate have diminished, they have been
replaced by similarly paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, and
resignation. As we begin to live through the massive dangers imparted
by climate change, as one psychologist put it to me, We are in
psychological terrain, whether we like it or not.
John Fraser is a conservation psychologist who has studied burnout and
trauma among people doing environmental work. We have to move beyond
terrorizing people with disaster stories, he told me. Responses to
climate change are often discussed as a spectrum, with denial and
disengagement at one end and intense alarm on the other. We are
getting more alarmed. In 2009, a Yale and George Mason study grouped
Americans responses to climate into six categories: alarmed,
concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive. In 2009,
eighteen per cent were alarmed; in 2018, that number had risen to
twenty-nine per cent.
Fraser wants people to feel not alarmed but activated, and he takes a
relentlessly positive, solutions-oriented attitude. We got trains all
the way across America in a few years, and people on the moon in a few
years, he said. And ideas for climate moonshots abound:
negative-carbon-emission plants are prohibitively expensive, but they
do exist; some advocate for reviving nuclear power; proponents of a
Green New Deal call for ending fossil-fuel extraction and subsidies,
and radically expanding public transportation. In Silicon Valley,
ideas are emerging that rely less on politics than on technology, like
flooding some deserts to grow carbon-sucking algae beds, or using
electrochemistry to get rocks to absorb carbon from the air. Fraser
believes that the most productive way to communicate about
environmental problems is to emphasize the positive solutions that
exist. What we need to promote is hope, he said. The first step to
a healthy response is feeling that the problem is solvable.
Is it appropriate to feel terrified? No, Fraser said. Because you
just shut down.
Margaret Klein Salamon, who trained as a clinical psychologist before
founding a climate-advocacy organization, takes the opposite view. She
doesnt see fear as paralyzing but as a necessary response that
activates people to recognize danger and take action. Whats more,
given the state of the atmosphere, she argues that acute fear is
rational. Its important to feel afraid of things that will kill
usthat is healthy and good, she said. She believes that reckoning
with the scope of the emergency is required, both to activate
responsible behavior and to reap the mental-health benefits of living
in climate truth. Salamon, who grew up in a family of psychoanalysts
and considers therapy to be something of a family business, is
writing Transform Yourself with Climate Truth, a self-help book on
the subject.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-other-kind-of-climate-denialism
---
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